Eric posted the video from uPortal’s EDUCAUSE Catalyst award onto Youtube:

At the Community Source reception cosponsored by JA-SIG, Sakai, Kuali it was uplifting to see the number of people participating. CIOs, managers, developers, vendors were all present in abundance. It was also clear from conversation at the reception that open-source in the Higher Ed is breaking into new areas. While there’s no question infrastructure and back-end systems, there’s increasing acknowledgment that open-source might has a role to play in end-user facing systems too. community driven open-source projects are being evaluated right along side best of breed solutions from vendors or ASP providers.

In fact, further than just being considered on par with packaged or commercial products, many, many people have indicated the message of “by Higher Education, for Higher Education” really resonates both within IT as well as with our end users. Ranging from solid support for integration with existing systems in uPortal, to teaching and learning as evidenced by the comment “It seems like EDUCAUSE is all Sakai” show a tremendous amount of attention and consideration being given for education build open-source solutions.

Open Source Portal Project Honored as Catalyst

Campustech did a short piece on JA-SIG uPortal winning EDUCAUSE’s Catalyst Award, where they mentioned the award, and then quoted some bits from Jim H…

Jim Helwig, the project manager of the uPortal project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison’s Department of Information Technology, said the project represented the cooperative spirit of higher education.

“It is great to be a part of this,” he said. “This is a great example of higher education institutions working well together and accomplishing a lot…. We should feel proud.”

and Jonathan Markow…

Jonathan Markow, chairman of JA-SIG, said the award “is particularly meaningful because it reflects the robust health and size of our community, as well as the maturity of the uPortal platform.”

I’m interested in topics like Open Source Communities, Development Methodology, Enterprise Portals, User Experience/Interface Design, Instructional Technology, and Identity Management and try to make it to relevant conferences and meetings when possible.

Upcoming

Limited events coming, though I’ve become pretty involved in the local Meetup Community in NYC.

Past

Portlets 2009 @ Canada

EDUCAUSE 2009

Portlets 2009 & CampusEAI Annual Conference (Cleveland, OH)

Jasig 2009 (Dallas, TX 3/1-3/4) Attending the 2009 Jasig & Community Source conference. Will be presenting a bit on some of the work we’re doing in myCampus around extending CAS for SSO w/blackbox applications, as well as covering Eugene’s presentation on Cross-Platform portlet development.

EDUCAUSE 2008 (Orlando, FL)

Jasig Unconference (Madison, WI)

Portlets 2008 & CampusEAI Annual Conference (Cleveland, OH)

Gettysburg Portals 2008 (Gettysburg, PA)

Sakai Conference (Paris, France)

Sakai Conference (Newport Beach, CA 12/4-7) – Attending the Sakai winter conference in Newport Beach.

JA-SIG Unconference (New Brunswick, NJ 11/12-13) – Am very interested in exploring portal-LMS integration and the roadmap/direction for the new uPortal 3 effort.

NJEdge Conference (10/31-11/2) – Presented a talk on Virtualization in Development and Testing.

EDUCAUSE (10/24-26)uPortal Training Conference (U. of Dundee, Scotland 10/15-19)

NYC Sakai User Group Meetup (NYU 9/25)

JA-SIG Summer 2007 (Denver 6/24-27) – I was on the conference program committee for the summer JA-SIG conference, and delivered a pair of Sakai related presentations.

• Integrating External Services With SakaiWednesday, June 27, 2007, 8:30AM-9:30AM
• Tuning Sakai for ProductionMonday, June 25, 2007, 4:45PM-5:45PM

Sakai Conference (Amsterdam 6/11-13) – Attended the Sakai Conference, to get up to speed and meet some of the various members of the community.

Portlets 2007 (University of Montana, May 16-18) – CampusEAI and the University of Montana organized a workshop/conference focused on portlet development. I presented 2 sessions, as well as met and networked with a number of University portlet developers. The sessions were:

• Portlet development using the Spring Framework. (slides)Thursday, May 17, 3:30PM – 4:20PM
• Central Authentication Service – CAS (slides)Friday, May 18, 10:30AM – 12:00PM

Spring 2007 uPortal Developers Meeting (JHU April 23-24) – XHTML/CSS theme work and anything that I’ve been doing with Jen from Yale related to AJAX D&D customization. Only made it to one day of this and dinner, but got to talk to a lot of other uPortal developers, and also picked up some Sakai tips to boot Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise (Philadelphia March 28-29) – Chariot Solutions is sponsoring a conference to talk about Enterprise, lightweight Java, Web 2.0 etc. I’ll be presenting:

• Leveraging RSS in Enterprise Integration (slides)Thursday, March 29, 1:00PM – 2:00PM

JA-SIG Winter 2006 (Atlanta 12/2-5) – I presented/facilitated a number of sessions.

• Assessing Identity Management Maturity: A Rutgers Case StudyMonday, December 4, 2006, 3:30PM-4:30PM
• Identity Management Best Practices DiscussionMonday, December 4, 2006, 4:45PM-5:45PM
• uPortal User Experience DiscussionTuesday, December 5, 2006, 11:30AM-12:30PM
• Providing Calendar Data within the PortalTuesday, December 5, 2006, 3:30PM-4:30PM

Fall 2006 uPortal Developers Meeting – Attended via video conference the uPortal developers meeting hosted at UW-Madison.Spring Forward 2006 – Attended this conference sponsored by Philly Spring JUG and Chariot Solutions. Was good, well focused, and seeded with implementors.Spring 2006 uPortal Developers Meeting – We hosted this one at Rutgers. JA-SIG Summer 2005 (Baltimore) – My first JA-SIG conference. I presented some of my experiences related to customizing the uPortal user interface.