*** PRESS EMBARGOED UNTIL 5 JUNE 2005 ***
Press Release
Baltimore, Maryland, USA -- 6 June 2005 --- Sakai, OSPI, and uPortal Convene Over 650 for First Community Source Week
Growing interest and confidence in open source software is evident as well over 650 attendees from 14 countries and five continents flock to the first Community Source Week (CSW05) in Baltimore, MD, USA (www.communitysourceweek.org). The week was organized by the Sakai Project, the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI), and uPortal by JA-SIG. Each project has a community of software developers and users focused on needs in higher education, and each had previously held separate conferences and frequently exchanged speakers and participants. It was decided to schedule the conferences consecutively as Community Source Week to deepen the relations among these communities and pull more open source users and developers together.
“Open source applications have moved from a few niche projects on the side to a very mainstream conversation for higher education,” said David Lambert, CIO at Georgetown University. “There is a real optimism that collaborative application development presents real solutions in the long standing search for better systems strategies in higher education.”
“This week is a great way to build the larger open source community as people from different projects meet and talk,” said Carl Jacobson, one of the creators of uPortal. “Open source applications for higher ed have come a long way in the last five years as we learned to work together.”
“We are at the beginning of a significant expansion in the open software community, driven by the power of the rapidly emerging tools and the swelling community of people working on them. Sakai Conference attendance has doubled in just six months,” said Joseph Hardin, Sakai Board Chair.
The week begins with the Sakai Conference on 8-10 June, OSPI on 10-11, and uPortal 12-14.
Each conference is full of parallel tracks regarding implementation, use, architecture, governance, and project roadmaps. And Community Source Week is not just for higher education, as each project has growing commercial support options for its open source software.
The conferences include a number of keynote speakers among the many working sessions:
The Sakai conference will feature Brian Behlendorf, Co-founder of the Apache Foundation – “How the Apache Foundation Works and How We Got There.” Conference co-chairs John Norman (Cambridge University) and Charles Powell (Yale University) have arranged a very full program.
"John and I have had a wonderful time helping to shape a program that's very rich in technical presentations, user support & deployment forums and special interest groups ranging from the Library to Pedagogy. We're thrilled with the number of different institutions and individuals that are stepping forward to contribute," said Powell. Thursday will also host an extended discussion of Sakai Project long-term governance by the 75 Partner institutions.
OSPI will kick off on Friday at 1pm with Steve Ehrmann, Director of the Flashlight Program and VP, The TLT Group, “ePortfolios are Many-Splendored Things: Strategies for Planning & Formative Evaluation of Evolving ePortfolio Initiatives.” The recent release of the Open Source Portfolio Version 2 is a major step forward for the use of educational portfolios. “Faculty advocates for portfolios now have a new tool as they move to more sophisticated uses of student portfolios,” said Jeff Haywood, University of Edinburgh. Sessions focus on ePortfolio implementation planning, roll out, support, pedagogical innovation, and software.
uPortal, the oldest and most widely adopted of the three projects, features keynote speaker Brad Wheeler, Associate Vice President for Community Source Initiatives & Dean of Information Technology at Indiana University, on the topic of “Deeper Waters Ahead: Choices and Consequences Confronting Open Source.” The uPortal segment of Community Source Week features three tracks offering education and support to participants at all points on the continuum of portal adoption—evaluators and early implementers, portlet developers and content providers, and portal architects building a platform for enterprise application integration.
“Community Source Week showcases how educational institutions are collaborating to define the next generation of business models for shared software needs,” says Jonathan Markow, Columbia University.
The projects use the term Community Source to refer to the model of investment and governance. Community Source is "community investments for community outcomes in the open source tradition" says Brad Wheeler, Dean of IT at IU Bloomington. Many of the investments in community source are institutional investments from higher ed, and this model fits well with their needs. The Sakai Project, the Open Source Portfolio, and uPortal were all seeded with a generous gift from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The conference is based at the Marriott Baltimore Inner Harbor.
CONTACT INFORMATION:
The Sakai Project (www.sakaiproject.org)
The Sakai Project provides open source Collaboration and Learning Environment software for educational institutions.
Joseph Hardin,
Chairman, Sakai Project Board
Director of the Collaborative Technologies Lab, University of Michigan
+1 734.647.9706
The Open Source Portfolio Initiative (www.theospi.org)
The Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) is a community of individuals and organizations collaborating on the development of the leading non-proprietary, open source electronic portfolio software available.
Brad Wheeler,
Chairman, OSPI Board
Assoc VP & Dean of IT, Indiana University
+1 812.855.3478
uPortal by JA-SIG, Inc. (www.uportal.org)
JA-SIG provides community support for open technology architectures and applications in higher education, including its award-winning open source uPortal software.
Jonathan Markow,
Chairman, JA-SIG Board
Interim Deputy VP, Administrative Information Services, Columbia University
+1 212.854.7381
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