Jason Shao - Rutgers University

 Bio

I currently serve as an Application Developer within Rutgers University's Office of Instructional and Research Technology. My current primary focus is implementation of the open-source Sakai Collaborative Learning Environment, complemented with evaluation and exploration of new tools in the collaboration and instructional spaces. Despite my current focus, I have a strong ongoing interest and involvement in enterprise development within higher education, especially within the JA-SIG community.

My involvement in JA-SIG began while working on myRutgers - an enterprise student portal serving over 60,000 users across Rutgers three campuses, built atop a JA-SIG core. Key factors to myRutgers success were the solid foundation provided by the uPortal framework and simple yet powerful single-sign offered through CAS. My work within Rutgers ESS touched many aspects of the software development lifecycle; development, user-interface design, release management, process development, documentation, communications and strategic planning. I also had the opportunity to co-author our initial identity management assessment, familiarizing me with many of the challenges and needs in that increasingly important space.

In addition to my work at Rutgers I have worked with several other schools and organizations for consulting and training projects related to JA-SIG products. This experience has given experience in a number of different organizational and technical environments, as well as a broader recognition of similarities and differences in the challenges faced by other institutions.

I'm a frequent participant on many of the JA-SIG development and user mailing lists, and can generally also be found on ##uportal. I've presented at numerous conferences including JA-SIG events on topics including uPortal, JSR-168, Identity Management, Spring Framework, and Sakai. Finally, I have also served in numerous volunteer roles including: Development Process Coordinator, Newsletter Chair, infrastructure team member, conference programming committee member, and developer.

I live with my wife (also a Rutgers graduate) and three children blocks away from Rutgers Piscataway campus allows me to follow Rutgers Football over the PA system from the comforts of my porch - good fortune indeed given how difficult our recent successes on the field have made getting tickets.

Platform Statement

Since it's founding JA-SIG has achieved many successes: building a community of software practitioners in higher education, promoting best practices, and building open-source software designed by and filling the needs of higher education. JA-SIG has grown from a loosely organized handful of schools discussing combined research and development to a maturing organization with dozens of members.

We do, however face many ongoing challenges. Our projects and efforts must continue to evolve to address changing market dynamics. Organizational, documentation, and communications challenges present undesirable barriers to new participation - particularly for contributors from smaller institutions or with non-technical backgrounds. Finally, we must be increasingly diligent in matters of intellectual property to ensure the protection and indemnification of both adopters and contributors.

My experiences at Rutgers and within JA-SIG have given me a clear sense that we are at a key point in the evolution of our organization. I believe my skills and experiences would make a valuable addition to our Board. In addition to my experiences as a JA-SIG contributor - my work with Sakaiand institutions new to deploying JA-SIG products has given me valuable outside perspective on our strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, while I have significant experience as a developer, many of my previous contributions have revolved around non-technical areas like communications or process development. If elected to the board I would seek to identify and address the broader needs of our membership, and ease participation by new contributors.

One area in which I would focus is furthering our evolution into a culture of collaboration over contribution. We have seen countless significant contributions made available within our community. Often, however, these contributions have occurred late in the development lifecycle, hampering sharing and evolution. JA-SIG has the potential to serve as a forum for facilitating early-stage collaboration. Promoting early-stage collaboration will help ensure we produce designs suitable for broad adoption, and ease building sustainable, multi-party efforts around our initiatives. JA-SIG already provides many tools for supporting collaborative efforts, though I believe a concerted effort to incubate projects around our needs and code will produce significant long-term benefits.

The second area in which I would focus is increasing the transparency and velocity of decision-making and communication both inside and outside of our community. We posses a wealth of tools at our disposal: blogs, wikis, email. It's crucial that we open up pathways for information to facilitate direct community participation in planning and direction, as community participation ultimately determines our success or.Thank you for the soapbox - my involvement with JA-SIG continues to be a privilege; both because of the needs we address, but no less importantly the individuals our community includes. I would love to further discuss anything related to JA-SIG or my views and can easily be reached at: jayshao@rutgers.edu or via my blog at: http://jay.shao.org .