Benn Oshrin - Rutgers University

Biography

 I've been a member of the higher education community for 16 years now, having had a variety of roles at institutions both public and private.  I started as a summer intern in Computer Science at Polytechnic's Long Island campus in 1992, became a part-time student in Mathematics at SUNY Stony Brook that fall, matriculated at Yale in 1993 where I was also a student employee and of which I am now an alumnus with a degree in Computer Science and Linguistics, was hired as a Systems Programmer by Columbia in 1997 where I was also briefly a student, and as of 2007 am employed by Rutgers.   I've spent some time in various higher education communities, including Internet2, CSG, Cartel, and now JA-SIG.

My first experience with IT from an academic perspective was as a student.  At Yale, I was hired as a Computing Assistant, providing front-line support to students and other members of the community, before becoming a Student Systems Programmer and Unix Specialist, where I helped develop and maintain software for the central Solaris cluster.  This was around the time dorms were first being wired and email adoption started approaching 100%.

At Columbia, I worked as a system administrator and developer, helping to manage around 200 Solaris and Linux servers, as well as to design and implement upgrades to the central email system, web servers, directory servers, and authentication/authorization stack.  Among my work during this time, I helped design a local variant of CAS with enhancements that subsequently became a reference point in the design of CAS 3.  I also coordinated an effort to add features to the CMU Cyrus codebase, and in 2006 became a founding member of the Cyrus Project governance board.

Two projects I was responsible for at Columbia were released under open licenses: mod_auth_pamacea (an Apache 2 authnz module) and SURVIVOR (a systems monitor).  A third project, the Meeting Request Scheduling and Booking System, has also been released under an open license.  I've also contributed patches to other projects.

These days, I am focusing on open Identity Management technologies.  This includes our current initiative to develop a roadmap and vision for CAS, as well as a new open registry initiative.  In my spare time, I write short autobiographies with self-referential concluding sentences.

Platform Statement

 There is a gap at the intersection of higher education and open software: lots of us use the stuff, but often without knowledge or support of our senior management, and sometimes by fluke of history.  There is another gap where limited resources meet common problems: we often have just enough ability to solve our immediate problem now, postponing the proper solution indefinitely, unable to leverage the work of our peers in similar situations.  JA-SIG is positioned to help close these gaps.

The purpose of an organization like JA-SIG is to help our IT departments best meet the needs of our Universities over both the short and long term.  Since Universities don't compete on supporting IT infrastructure, we have the opportunity to collaborate, making better use of our available time and people.

The Spring 2008 conference was a great success in capturing the essence of this message.  How do we now build on that?  How do we go from being a community that randomly stumbles across collaborative efforts to one that consistently leverages each other's abilities?  How does JA-SIG go from providing support for projects like uPortal and CAS to becoming an advocate for the adoption of a broader array of solutions like these?  How do we close the gaps?

I would like to see a coordinated, open dialogue across the membership begin to answer these questions, and in doing so help achieve our member institutions' goals while also helping shape the future of JA-SIG.