Bio
Jens Haeusser is the Director of Strategy in the Information Technology
department at the University of British Columbia, a position he has held
since 2006. He is responsible for fostering outstanding IT solutions
throughout the highly decentralized UBC campus by developing creative and
relevant IT strategies that anticipate and reflect broad campus needs,
developing strategic relationships with faculties and administrative units,
and building long-range plans for IT directions at UBC. In addition to his
role within UBC, Jens is an active participant and frequent presenter and
facilitator in many other organizations at the provincial, national, and
international level, including EDUCAUSE, Internet2, CANHEIT, CIPS, BCNET,
and as a JASIG and Fluid board member. He plays a leadership role on
Identity Management as a member of the Middleware Architecture Committee for
Education, and on the steering committees of both the Canadian Access
Federation and the EDUCAUSE Identity Management Working Group. An advocate
for the transformative role of Service Oriented Architecture within the
higher education community, Jens is also involved in promoting and
architecting the next generation Community Source Student Service System,
Kuali Student.
Prior to his current position, Jens spent a decade as a departmental IT
administrator before founding the UBC Information Security Office in 2003.
In his role as Information Security Officer, he helped build a culture of
security at UBC, developing security strategy and policy and leading an
operational team that dramatically improved the IT security stance of the
University. Jens was a member of the Internet2/Educause Security Task Force,
and is chair of the BCNET Security and Identity Management Working Groups.
Platform Statement
It has been my pleasure and privilege to have been involved with a wide
range of open source communities for the past 15 years, initially as a
deployer and developer, and more recently as board member and vocal
supporter of the role and strategic importance of open and community source
in higher education. I have been a participant in the Jasig community since
2003, and have been honoured to be the Treasurer on the Jasig Board since
2006.
During my previous term on the Jasig Board, my goal as Treasurer was to move
Jasig from a grant and sponsorship supported organization to fully
self-sustaining membership organization. I am proud of the successes we have
shared as a community, moving from a fragile financial outlook and years of
conferences with significant deficits, to a self-sufficient membership
organization with a strong financial position, and series of conferences
that have returned money to help grow the community.
In addition to my internally focused role as treasurer, I have played an
active role in promoting Jasig to the broader higher education community. I
have acted as a Jasig liaison and advocate to a wide range of organizations,
including Fluid, Kuali, Internet2, and many others. The collaboration
between uPortal and both the Fluid and Shibboleth communities, and our
successes in bringing together a wide range of open source projects both at
and after our conferences has been a hallmark of our growing influence
within the higher education development community.
If elected to a second term on the Jasig Board, in addition to continuing to
shepherd our community in trying financial times, my focus will be on
enhancing Jasig's role as a key strategic player in the higher education
open source landscape. As more and more campuses look to open source
solutions as a key part of their software landscape, the need for a
welcoming and supportive community of open source developers and deployers
becomes ever more critical. Jasig needs to build on our successes in
bringing together communities of interest, as our recent experiences with
Identity and Access Management have demonstrated. We also need to continue
to bring other outstanding software solutions to our community, continuing
the trend begun with the addition of Bedework to our stable of projects.
It has been my distinct honour in serving the Jasig community as a board
member over the past 3 years. I look forward to continuing to contribute my
energy, enthusiasm, and expertise as we move forward into our second decade
as an increasingly vibrant open source community.