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2010 - Gary Schwartz - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

2010 - Gary Schwartz - Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

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

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 RPI, 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 were the founding developers  of Bedework (http://bedework.org), the open source calendaring system which became a Jasig sponsored project in March 2010.  I have served as the project manager and spokesperson for Bedework, and now serve as the chair of the Bedework Steering Committee.

I presently serve as President  CalConnect, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium, a non-profit formed to promote calendaring standards and interoperability (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 served 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. I and/or members of the Bedework team have presented at Jasig Conferences and participated in Unconferences.   I participated 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 in Spring 2009, and I brokered an invitation for Jasig to present on ESUP Help Desk at the  2-3-98 conference (https://confluence.delhi.edu/display/ODD/2-3-98+Conference).  Jonathan Markow and I just returned from a visit to the Public University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, where we were invited to present on Jasig, Bedework, and open source at a meeting of CRUE-TIC, representing the IT leadership of over 70 Spanish universities. We also had the opportunity to speak with much of the CRUTE-TIC , and many of the other member representatives.

My team at RPI supports CAS and (naturally) Bedework. This fall we will be running what I believe is the first production instance in English of ESUP HelpDesk, a Jasig incubator project.

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 Harris has 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. I believe in broad membership participation in governance.
  7. I would like to see Jasig increase its membership.  Right now, I think there are great opportunities for expansion (and collaboration) in Europe and the Americas.
  8. Increasingly Higher Ed is turning to “above-campuses” services, in the words of Brad Wheeler and Shel Waggener. We need to define what this means to Jasig, and how Jasig will respond to a world of services, not just software.
  9. Unlike Chauncey Gardiner, I would rather participate than watch.