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Boards / Advisory Experience. Chestnut Hill School (Chestnut Hill, MA), New Profit, Inc. (Cambridge, MA), Winsor School (Boston, MA), Bethel AME Church (Boston, MA).
Platform Statement
My vision for JA-SIG is to provide leadership through community within the higher education ecosystem. JA-SIG has done an excellent job cultivating community around its core open source projects - uPortal, CAS and Hypercontent - and extends that leadership through its collaboration with other community projects, such as Sakai, DSpace, Fedora, Kuali, Internet2 and Fluid. By providing a forum for open source projects to reach technology leaders in higher education, JA-SIG can further service its members and extend its influence.
I hope to contribute to the board in several ways. I have significant experience in helping organizations and companies think through their core value and how to realize, cultivate and extend that value. I am an integrative strategist and business architect, so I care about locating value and connecting it to mission, pulling diverse assets together to achieve the mission, and building capabilities that last. I am an experienced product evangelist and I am good at selling concepts that I believe in.
I believe that JA-SIG must balance its role as custodian of technology projects with its role of leadership that may transcend those projects as they are incarnated in a particular version of technology. For example, I was a strong advocate of finding a pathway forward for uPortal to transition its membership to a next generation platform. Legacy platforms die, and their communities die with them. That is not consistent with what will best serve higher education institutions. Instead, by riding the wave of innovation - through our projects and how they relate to the rest of the world - we better ensure the posterity of JA-SIG projects and the communities that have built up around them.
As an employee of a commercial entity, I can bring a breadth and depth of perspectives regarding the direction of the higher ed market from a commercial perspective. As Director of New Ventures, I can lend to JA-SIG the insights I obtain in the course of the market scans I do as a part of my job.
Finally, I believe that technology plays a critical role in solving the challenges of higher ed today. As a member of the JA-SIG board, I can continue to contribute to be part of the solution.