2010 - Andrew Petro - Unicon

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

Biography

After graduating with a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University in 2004, Andrew stayed on to serve his alma mater as a casual systems programmer with the Technology & Planning group. His interests include automated software testing, application frameworks, and electronic security. Projects in which Andrew has been involved include the Central Authentication Service, YaleInfo Portal (Yale's uPortal implementation), and the Jasig uPortal project. Andrew served as the release engineer for uPortal 2.6.x and for 2.5.x and has been published in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery on the topic of electronic voting. In 2006 Andrew joined Unicon full time, serving roles since then including technical lead on Academus and on Cooperative Support for uPortal.  Among the Unicon accomplishments of which Andrew is most proud is his role in bringing to the market community-aligned technical support offerings for uPortal and CAS in the form of Unicon's Cooperative Support program.

Platform Statement

I gratefully accept the nomination to the CAS steering committee. It would be a pleasure to continue to serve the broader Jasig community in this capacity. I have been actively involved in Jasig and CAS since before I graduated college and have attended many Jasig conferences, at which I have routinely presented sessions involving CAS.

I believe Jasig has evolved well and continues to be relevant today. As a member of the Jasig CAS steering committee, I will continue to advance the CAS platform and its adoption in at least these ways:

  • Improving the documentation and marketing of the wide use of CAS, available customizations, and the positive experiences and value it has brought to its adopters
  • Steering the CAS 4 and continuing CAS 3 featuresets to align with the single sign on needs of Jasig constituents, leading to further platform adoption and additional value for present adopters
  • Continuing to strengthen relationships with related open source communities including uPortal (which includes an embedded CAS server), Sakai (the use of CAS with which having been a topic of Sakai conference presentation by Dan McCallum and me), and Shibboleth

Secure, free, reasonably easily implemented and well documented open source authentication is important to the continued security and efficiency of application integration in higher education. The continued vibrance of the CAS project is important for all the applications it touches across all the many adopters.

Few projects have with such humble beginnings done so much good and delivered so much value to higher education information technology as has the CAS project. I hope you will elect me to the Jasig CAS steering committee where I will be honored to be part of the continued steering of the successful Central Authentication Service project. I plan to continue to work hard on behalf of the entire CAS community in this new role or out of it, in addition to staying involved with the uPortal project.