Well the questions are pouring in (mostly due to my tardiness in writing this kind of announcement) and so, without farther ado…

What Happened?

While it still feels a little strange to say it, as of 2 Fridays ago (2/8) I am no longer employed at Rutgers University. Over the last 9 years as first a student, then staff member, I’ve had the chance to: first study under, and then work with some incredible people. I’ve gotten to watch projects and services grow and evolve into solutions that are used every day by tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff.

Before addressing my personal situation, I feel the need to speak a bit about the Rutgers Sakai deployment which up until now has occupied so much of my thoughts and energy. I was fortunate enough to see myRutgers grew into a service providing tools and services to every student at Rutgers. Sakai usage is currently somewhere on that curve, with usage growing by leaps and bounds. This Spring’s semester in many ways feels like a qualitative shift in the nature of the service — marked by a huge increase in the number of students asking “where’s my class’s Sakai site.” This semester these questions are particularly significant, as many of them are coming from students in classes where either:

1. Class was not yet in session. This is a big change from the dynamic in previous semesters where students typically visited the first meeting of their class, and were then directed to visit the Sakai site. Now students are looking to visit the Sakai site to see the syllabus, readings, and get a leg up on going to that first class.
2. Their instructor had not created a site. Sakai seems poised to make the jump into ubiquity, as in some students minds it’s already there.

Now to handle the really common question — if the Rutgers Sakai deployment is so clearly poised for greatness, where am I going and why? Well…

Starting this past monday (2/11) I have taken a position with the CampusEAI Consortium, where I will be serving as the Director of Open Source Solutions. Recent years have seen a huge upswing in the popularity, and visibility of open and community source solutions in Higher Education. Sakai, uPortal, CAS, Kuali, and othes have garnered attention, awards, and deployments. Due to significant interest expressed by member institutions, CampusEAI is looking to complement its existing strengths on the Oracle platform with broader offerings in the open-source space.

Answers to some personal-ish questions:

Are you moving to Cleveland?

No, I’m going to be based out of NJ, though Continental is certainly getting a good chunk of my time for the next few months as I schlep back and forth.

What does Lisa think?

She’s excited. Well, more excited when I’ve been gone < 2 days as opposed to > 3 days…

What do the kids think?

The kids are still getting used to not picking me up at Rutgers. They think it’s really funny that daddy works somewhere they can’t see. Sunday nights are hard. Phone calls are bittersweet. Coming back is good.

Aren’t you on the JA-SIG Board?

Yes. When my career change became definite I notified the board at the January video call. JA-SIG has always been a community of volunteers (stellar volunteers more often than not) and particular given my new employer’s willingness to continue backing my involvement in JA-SIG it was felt that there were no significant barriers to my continuing to serve in this capacity. As always, JA-SIG

So… is your Rutgers job open?

Yes. Though (see below) I’m hiring too…

What’ll I be doing?

So what does this mean in concrete terms? My personal definition is pretty simple. We’re looking to help members deploy solutions built on open source software. Given my background, Sakai, uPortal, CAS, and maybe even Kuali are obvious possibilities. I think however, that it’s a broader story than just support for deploying a few specific products. Many institutions have experienced challenges in building around open-source due to shortages in staffing or specific skill-sets. Others have successfully deployed open-source solutions, but been burned trying to deepen integration, or due to staff turnover (a problem which I should note also happens around commercial solutions). So the goal of this new unit is to make deploying solutions built on open-source:

1. Easy
2. Cost Effective
3. Low Risk
4. Sustainable
5. Did I say easy?

Basically the goal is to allow schools to leverage the strengths inherent in the open-source development model:

• Try before buy
• Rational licensing and cost-containment (instead of getting wracked with heavy licensing burdens as you get “too successful”)
• Open implementations, generally of open standards
• Economy of scale versus custom developed institution-specific software
• Freedom from vendor roadmaps and strategy shifts — even to go as far as obtain competitive bids from multiple vendors on the same solutions
• Peer interaction with really bright people working hard to solve the same problems you see

So that’s the goal. Make open-source easier, removing barriers for schools large & small — the kind of topics that have continually been commented on lists, in journals, and at conferences. Reducing installation pain. Helping with patch management. Providing support and training. Taking the pain and risk out of going open-source, all while working to make strategic contributions to enable the production of more good software.

It should be exciting.

P.S. Did I mention we’re hiring? Drop an email talking about your love for open-source, and how you really want to join in making it easier: jason_shao@campuseai.org. Oh, and mention you saw the posting in my blog

Continuing the meme of looking at twitter usage, here’s mine:

Heavily JA-SIG slanted, but Sakai is starting to gain…

After taking out a while to do introductions and handle the administrativa (even unconfs can’t seem to get away from it) we’re into the lightning talks which I’m trying to keep up with to podcast. They’re going pretty fast, we’ve gone through something like 6 so far, and they’re coming up fast.

Update: I was reminded (and should have been more explicit in the original post) that you really need permission to distribute recordings of speakers. To clarify — I have recordings of most of the lightning talks, but certainly intend to email all of the speakers to ask for permission before posting. I had hoped to have real release forms available for the event, but didn’t quite make it — in the future events we certainly aim to have all our ducks in order in advance.

I’ve been using Colloquy as an IRC client — for the most part it’s just beautiful and very Mac like. There is however one annoying recurring bug…

“Blank Chat Room Bug” [#576] Blank chat room bug Sometimes, in random intervals, some auto-joined chat rooms appear as blank / empty / not active / plain white (or whatever background color your style uses), although activity can be observed through the unread messages counter or Growl notifications. Workaround: As a workaround you can type /reload style in the affected chat rooms.

What this means is that sometimes, randomly all the text in the room disappears — this has lead to some funny “helloo…” moments on ##uportal. Hopefully posting this tip here saves someone some grief.

I’ve posted some more photos of Chris and the girls. Twins aren’t so bad–most of the time. Sometimes, they’re a couple of handfulls. Having twins and a highly energetic 17-month old at the same time… that’s quite a stretch. Hence the long delay in posting pictures.

The twins are shooting up like weeds though, and Chris seems to have taken a liking to them now that the initial shock has passed. He’s actually trying to be pretty helpful. Unfortunately helpful includes fetching open cups of water…

Movable Type 3.0 – We realize that official news has been scarce over the last 6-9 months. During this time, our company has grown from two people to seven, and we have launched TypePad . Now that we have hired more engineering resources (and we are still looking for more ), we are able to focus again on our Movable Type product line. As mentioned in this post on the Six Log , we’re focusing on releasing more personal features in the basic Movable Type package, and concentrating features for businesses, organizations, and large content-driven sites into Movable Type Pro (which, needless to say, has been delayed). [Movabletype.org]

All I can say is that this is great Christmas present. After seeing Typepad get all the attention and nifty new features, it will be neat to see what Six Apart put together for the new version of Movable Type. Continue Reading »