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This is the second in a series of interviews with individuals who are active participants in the JA-SIG community. Alain Mayeur, a member of the JA-SIG board of directors, is IT Director at the University of Valenciennes. Alain is a leader and one of the founders of the ESUP-Portail consortium, a group of approximately eighty French institutions collaborating on community source efforts based around uPortal.
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Alain, how did you first become involved in ESUP-Portail?
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In 2002, the Ministry of Higher Education in France developed a national plan to build a digital workspace offering university students and staff integrated access to services and information. I contributed significantly to the definition of this plan. After this step, a call for projects was proposed by the Ministry to finance production of this type of portal. So we decided, with a group of Universities (the Universities of Valenciennes, Rennes1, Nancy1 and Nancy2, and the ENSEEIHT School of Engineering), to propose a national project using open source software. ESUP-Portail was chosen and development was funded. The third step was to create the community for the deployment of the portal and its application components. Now, more than 80 institutions are involved in the expansion phase and it's a large success for us.
Q. In general, what is the attitude towards open source software in France?
In France, the government promotes the use of free software in administration, but these recommendations take time to be implemented. In our community of higher education, the use of open source software has had an increasingly important role. The university IT directors have understood that the issues are to facilitate adaptability, to reduce the costs and to assure a better evolution for their information systems.
Q. Do you find that French open source projects are any different from those originating in North America or other European countries?
We can see an important evolution in our community with a project like ESUP-Portail. We have a large community, an organization to share development experiences, and all code is open with a GPL license. We try to develop this type of collaboration with several institutions for new applications or projects, and our orientation seems to be similar to open source projects we can find in other countries. For example, a new French project (ORI-OAI) for indexing and archiving digital resources with the facility to realize networks of thematic portals using the OAI (Open Archives Initiative) protocol, can be compared to projects like Dspace or Fedora.
Q. Is there anything unique or special about the ESUP-Portail consortium that makes it different from other community source groups?
The particularity of the consortium is to have developed a portal with important interfaces to the information systems of the university. The consortium assures the distribution of the solution to the French community but also encourages and organizes the development of new applications and their integration in the portal (using our incubator development framework).
Q. From a personal perspective, what has been the most rewarding aspect of your work?
The most rewarding part of this work is to contribute to the creation of a large community at a national level which now shares the same strategy, and to see that the approach we have proposed is now well recognized. A particular pleasure of mine is to participate in different strategic committees for the promotion and the start of new projects which allow the universities to increase the use of information technologies for their various activities.
Q. What would you change about the higher education open source movement to improve it?
An important point to accelerate the use of open source in higher education is to have a great knowledge of projects at the international level and to build projects by capitalizing on already well recognized solutions. It's necessary to have a large community and to assure a coherence and convergence of technology. But of course, this is a main goal of the JA-SIG organization; it's for that reason we are convinced of the importance of participating in and supporting this community.
Q. What new technologies do you think look promising for higher education in the future?
Some important points are to have an increasing integration of services in the portal institutions with high interactivity and intuitive interfaces; allow access to different networks of educational resources; build good documentation within learning platforms; and facilitate the use and access of resources with new mobile devices.
Q. Finally, tell us something about yourself. What is your background? Did you always work in technology? What interests do you have outside of your work?
After four years as a developer and project manager in a research centre for aerospace, I chose to work in higher education, starting in 1983. My function at the University of Valenciennes is IT Director. I have a team of 36 people, and I work on the development and strategy for Information Technology as it is applied to various activities at the institution. Also, for the past several years, I have served as an IT expert for The Ministry of Higher Education and have piloted several national and regional projects. My favorite passion during free time is practicing the Landyacht on the broad beaches of Northern France.
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