2010 - Susan Bramhall - Yale University

Owned by Ken McCrery
Last updated: Jul 15, 2010Version comment
3 min read

Biography

Susan has been designing and building software for 40 years.  For the last 33 years she has worked for Yale University exploring and piloting numerous emerging technologies and facilitating their transfer to wide use within ITS at Yale.  In the last 3-5 years Susan has become a strong voice for community source and cross-institution collaborative development within Yale's IT organization. 

Professional Highlights

  • Lead architect for Yale's implementation of the Jasig uPortal product.
  • Design and build identity registry for Yale faculty, staff, students and others.  Served as technical lead on a homegrown OS/2 SQL Server based "people file" in the early 1990's and was the lead architect of Yale's implementation of Oracle Identity Management in 2007-2008.  Currently consulting on building of roles management function for Yale IDM suite.
  • Implementations of CAS clients in support of proxy authentication

Jasig Experience

Susan attended the first JA-SIG meeting ("Java in Administration - Special Interest Group") and immediately got involved in the community driven design and development of a portal by and for higher education.  She has been contributing, advocating and developing both uPortal and the Yale portal, YaleInfo, for the last 9 years.  A secondary success has been her ability to inspire Yale portal team members to contribute major innovations and leadership to uPortal over the last ten years.

After joining the board in 2007, Susan served as Secretary for a year.  In 2009 she worked with a small group to create the Jasig incubation process and is now the chair of the incubation committee.  This spring Jasig officially announced our first incubation success with sponsorship of the excellent Bedework project.  The committee expects to promote several new portlets to Jasig officially sponsored status over the coming months. 

Susan serves as board liaison to the CAS Steering committee and has served on several conference planning committees.

Life Experience

Susan is a devoted grandmother, cyclist, kayaker, ballroom dancer, budding guitarist and long time peace activist.  She has served for many years on local nonprofit boards and especially enjoys working to bring groups to consensus. 

Platform Statement

Jasig's strength is its strong developer community and meritocracy based governance.  In the face of the current financial strain on schools and universities, I see an opportunity for Jasig as provider of open source solutions as well a challenge in finding sufficient resources to meet our desired milestones.  Expanding membership is a crucial requirement for the organization to be sustainable - and a difficult task in the current environment.  Board members can help strengthen Jasig by bringing in new members and working to ensure that the organization provides good value to all members.

The higher education community is at its best when collaborating and sharing insights, experience and knowledge. Jasig has created a community of software designers, developers and users that promotes collaboration and shared development to the advantage of all involved.  Jasig's culture of grassroots meritocracy is a valuable asset for participating projects.  In terms of governance, Jasig projects must continually strive to be excellent models of respectful collaboration.  The incubation process, begun in 2009, is designed to create and enhance the community around collaborative community source projects.  Through incubation, Jasig provides infrastructure and governance so that sponsored projects can thrive.  I hope to ensure that Jasig continues to sustain and grow its inclusive and innovative community by bringing new projects into Jasig through incubation. 

I believe the annual conference and un-conferences are critical to sustaining and invigorating the Jasig community.  These face to face events are where ideas stimulated by networking and communication with colleagues lead to break through changes for both individuals and projects.  I am strongly in favor of promoting face to face meetings whenever possible.

My leadership style is based in my love of open collaborative teamwork.  My work on the Jasig board and committees is typical of my hands on approach to organizational work.  I believe my long history with Jasig will continue to help me make a significant contribution to the organization by serving another term on the board.Â