Gary Schwartz - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Owned by Jonathan Markow
Last updated: Jul 07, 2009Version comment
4 min read

Biography

I am Director of Communications & Middleware Technologies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and have over 25 years (ouch) experience in Higher Ed IT, first as a programmer, and subsequently in IT management. I hold a B.S. in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from the State University of New York at Albany (now the "University at Albany"). Prior to coming to RPI, as best as I can remember, I was a programmer in various operating systems development groups at what was then Sperry Univac.

My present responsibilities at RPI include centralized email, directory, web services, mobile devices, identity management and middleware, and software development. Over my career at RPI, my responsibilities have covered virtually all areas of centralized IT save for networking and administrative computing.

RPI are the lead developers of Bedework (http://bedework.org), the open source calendaring system which is now a Jasig incubation project.  I am the project manager and spokesperson for Bedework.

I presently serve as Vice President and CFO of CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium. (http://www.calconnect.org). I do not believe that my obligations and responsibilities as a (uncompensated) CalConnect Director represent a conflict of interest as defined in Section 4 of the Jasig Bylaws.  I have been an active participant in CalConnect since RPI became a member in January 2005, and serve as chair of the FreeBusy Technical Committee, and as a member of the Publicity and Steering Committees. I participated in the Federated FreeBusy demo at the TOG meeting in Miami in July of 2006. I proposed and coordinated the joint Bedework/CalConnect European Tour in November 2007, and again for the 2008 CalConnect European Tour in Prague and London. I represented and presented on behalf of CalConnect at the Collaborative Technology Conference in Boston in June 2006.

RPI has been a Jasig member since April 2009, just a few months ago. My Jasig participation has not been as extensive as my CalConnect participation to date, but even prior to RPI becoming a Jasig member, I and/or members of the Bedework team have presented at Jasig Conferences and Unconferences.   I participated, albeit intermittently, in the Jasig web site redesign. I have looked for opportunities to promote Jasig - I invited the Jasig Executive Director to speak at an open source symposium I organized at RPI this spring, and I brokered an invitation for Jasig to present on ESUP Help Desk at the upcoming 2-3-98 conference (https://confluence.delhi.edu/display/ODD/2-3-98+Conference) later this summer. My team has just installed ESUP Help Desk for evaluation at RPI, and has made this instance available to the Jasig Executive Director for evaluation and demo usage. 

I am invited to give presentations on Bedework, open source, or both, somewhere between six and twelve times a year. Unlike Frank Harris, of whom Oscar Wilde is alleged to have said, ""Frank Harrishas been received in all the great houses - once", sometimes I am asked back.

Platform Statement

1.      I believe in Jasig's mission.

2.      I would like to help Jasig grow its product portfolio, and to broaden its scope and impact.

3.      I would like to see Jasig support and nurture the burgeoning activities and organizations for student-developed OSS in higher education.

4.      I would like to see Jasig's recent forays into collaboration with other OSS foundations continue to expand in both breadth and depth.  I would like to see Jasig actively facilitate and broker integration between its sponsored projects and OSS products from other foundations.

5.  Jasig has become better defined, better organized and better structured, but more work needs to be done to achieve Barry Walsh's vision of Jasig as one of the "Pillars of the open source community in higher education", providing the foundation for Jasig to become the "umbrella organization for projects to distinct community", such as infrastructure, or perhaps, enabling applications for higher ed.

6.      Jasig and Unicon seem to have an effective and mutually beneficial relationship, with Unicon providing support for CAS and uPortal. However, there is a wide gulf between formal, for fee, support arrangements, such as those provided by Unicon, and support mailing lists and web sites. The IDS project, http://idsproject.org/, is not an open source project but a "... a mutually supportive resource-sharing cooperative within New York State whose members include public and private academic libraries, the New York Public Library, and the New York State Library". Their "mentor program", http://idsproject.org/About/Mentors.aspx,"...which assigns volunteer applications and systems specialists from current member libraries to each new member. Through both onsite visits and regular communications, the mentors help the staff at the joining library to...implement the technical requirements of the IDS Project".  Concepts such as this one are worth exploring as a way of making OSS accessible to a much wider audience.

7.      Although it sounds more than a little self-serving, I believe in broad membership participation in governance, and term limits for that participation.

8.      Unlike Chauncey Gardiner, I would rather participate than watch.