Alain Mayeur - University of Valenciennes

Bio / Platform Statement

Alain Mayeur, member of the Jasig board of directors since 2006, and IT Director at the University of Valenciennes in France.

I am the 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.

An important requirement for accelerating the use of open source in higher education in France 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.  It's for that reason we are convinced of the importance of participating in the Jasig organization and supporting this community.

A unique characteristic of our consortium is to have developed a portal with interfaces to the important information systems of the university and connectors with other open-source projects (e-learning, indexing and archiving digital resources platforms, for example). The consortium assures the distribution of the solutions to the French community but also encourages and organizes the development of new applications and their integration in the portal.

We have seen an important evolution in our community, ESUP-Portail, and we share the same strategy and orientation as Jasig.  We want to increase our contributions to JASIG.

It's important for our French consortium to maintain and increase collaboration with Jasig; for this reason I propose serving a new term on the board of directors.