Board of Directors Candidates - Elections 2009

Bio

Ian Boston

Dr Ian Boston from the University of Cambridge, UK, has been involved in Sakai from the early days. He was responsible for early Sakai tools including RWiki and Search. He took responsibility for the Portal and Kernel in Sakai 2.x and latterly is the re-implementation of Sakai 3.

Ian has a background in mechanical engineering and parallel computing. First degree being in Engineering Design and Manufacture. He holds a PhD in parallel computing and engineering stress analysis. Following his PhD he joined Professor Tony Hey’s group at the University of Southampton to lead research projects in High Performance Computing. In the mid 1990’s he became interested in the startup activity in Silicon Fen around Cambridge and became actively involved in startup companies, sitting on a number of Boards as investor representative and technical innovator. One of those board positions became full time and he became CTO of Procession plc a London based Software House supporting enterprise processes in large organizations world wide. With arrival of a family he joined Caret at the University of Cambridge as CTO, although he still maintains an active involvement in some of the earlier startups.

Ian is an overseas member of the Australian Computer Society, a committer and PMC member at the Apache Software Foundation with the Apache Sling and Apache Shindig projects. In his spare time he enjoys offshore sailing, windsurfing and surfing.

Michael Feldstein

Michael Feldstein is author of the e-Literate weblog and Principal Product Manager for Academic Enterprise Solutions at Oracle Corporation. Prior to working at Oracle, Michael was an Assistant Director at the SUNY Learning Network, where he oversaw blended learning faculty development and was part of the leadership team for the LMS platform migration efforts of this 40-campus program. Prior to that, he was co-founder and CIO of MindWires, a company that provided e-learning and knowledge management products and services to Fortune 500 corporations, with a special emphasis on software simulations. He has also been the interim CLO at The Otter Group, a Senior Partner at Christensen/Roberts Solutions, and a Senior Instructional Designer at Raymond Karsan Associates. In prior lives, Michael has been a freelance writer, an English PhD student, a middle school and high school teacher, a tire wrangler at a Yokohama Tire warehouse, and a professional loafer at Schooley’s Mountain County Park.

Michael was a very early participant in Open Source Learning Management Systems projects, having been one of the early participants (and the only non-technologist participant at the time) of the OpenACS community in early 2000—the community that would eventually spawn the GPL-licensed dotLRN Learning Management System. He is currently a member of Sakai’s Product Council and regularly presents at Sakai conferences.

Michael has been a member of eLearn Magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board and is currently a participant in the IMS as a member of its Learning Technology Advisory Council (LTAC). He is a frequent invited speaker on a range of e-learning-related topics including e-learning usability, LMS evaluation methods, e-learning interoperability stnadards, ePortfolios, and edupatents for organizations ranging from the eLearning Guild to the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council. He has been interviewed as an e-learning expert by a variety of media outlets, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Associated Press, and U.S. News and World Report. 

Maggie Lynch

Dr. Maggie McVay Lynch has over 30 years in education, with the past two decades working online in some capacity. Her background includes K-12, higher education, and private industry. She has personally developed over 200 online courses for colleges, universities and private industry and supervised the development of thousands. She has taught both face-to-face and fully online courses in Psychology, Education, Business Administration, and Management Information Systems. Her educational background includes a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Psychology, and a M.S. and Ed.D. in Instructional Technology and Distance Education. Dr. Lynch has worked both in academia and in the software industry, giving her a unique perspective on the application of technology and education in a variety of environments. She is currently the Dean of Distance Education at College of the Redwoods, where she provides strategic direction and support for administrators, faculty and students engaged in teaching and learning with technology. She has consulted widely with other higher education institutions around the world regarding e-learning systems development and management. Outside of her many contracts in the U.S., her consulting has taken her to Australia, Canada, China, England, Germany, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and the United Arab Emirates.

Work with Sakai:

Dr. Lynch has been a part of the Sakai community since 2002, and has been a frequent presenter at both Sakai conferences and other e-learning conferences. Her most recent contributions have been as part of the Teaching & Learning Group, developing the evaluation rubric for the Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award and providing input to a number of pedagogical and user-related issues. In 2008 she received recognition as a Sakai fellow.

Publications:

Dr. Lynch has over 50 publications in peer reviewed journals and chapters in books. In addition, the following three textbooks are still in print and frequently used in higher education programs.

• Lynch, M. M. and Roecker, J. (2007). PROJECT MANAGING E-LEARNING: A handbook for successful design, delivery, and management. Routledge Books, London. Taylor & Francis, New York. (focused on project managers)
• >Lynch, M. M. (2004) LEARNING ONLINE: A guide to success in the virtual classroom.
• >Routledge Study Guides. Routledge Books, London. Taylor & Francis, New York (focused on e-learning students)
• Lynch M. M. (2002). THE ONLINE EDUCATOR: A guide to creating the virtual classroom. Routledge Series in Distance Learning. Routledge Books, London. Taylor & Francis, New York (designed for Instructional Designers, Faculty, and Administrators) 

Chuck Severance

I have been involved in Sakai from the beginning as the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project and later the first Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation. More recently I have had the opportunity to go back into the classroom as a full-time faculty member in the University of Michigan School of Information where I use Sakai on a daily basis. I teach courses in Technology Literacy, Web Site Development, and Social Computing. I work closely with graduate students in the School of Informatics and talented undergraduates in the Informatics concentration.  In addition to teaching, I work as a consultant with the IMS Global Learning Consortium where I help in the development, promotion, and dissemination of existing and emerging standards for the portability and interoperability of both data and software. I have spent the last two years refining and improving standards such as Learning Tools Interoperability, Common Cartridge, and Learner Information Services.  I currently serve on the Board of Directors of the Etudes non-profit corporation which contributes Melete, JForum, and Mneme to the Sakai community.

I continue to contribute technically to the Sakai product as a committer.  I tend to focus my technical efforts on Melete, the Sakai portal, the E-Mail Archive tool, and the upcoming IMS Basic LTI tool for the 2.7 release. While I no longer work full-time on Sakai, having summers off allows me some flexibility in doing technical work on Sakai.  In addition, I recently completed a new Sakai tool that enables instructors to establish simple navigational connections between sites, allowing them to construct simple hierarchies of Sakai sites.

I have also written a book on "Using the Google Application Engine", published in 2009 by O'Reilly and Associates. This compliments my previous book on "High Performance Computing", also from O'Reilly and Associates, published in 1998.

My research focus is the application of technology to teaching and learning. I am exploring how Open Educational Resources (OER) can be best re-used and remixed in new educational contexts. My research has developed a simple, embeddable Collaboration and Learning Management System, using JavaScript which is called CloudSocial (www.cloudsocial.org).  My interest in OER has lead me to work with the Rice University Connexions project (www.cnx.org) - I am writing my next text book titled, "Technology Literacy" using Connexions and it will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution license and my students will be able to get a printed copy of the book for less than ten dollars.  The book will be an experiment in open content and knowledge creation by bringing in my students as co-authors - so they not only use the book during a semester, but they also improve the book for the next semester.

You are welcome to find out more about me by looking at my personal web site - www.dr-chuck.com.  You can find out about the software I have written over the years, online copies of my television programs from the mid-1990's, and my blog posts for the past six years. If you look closely, you can even see me riding a dirt bike, playing hockey, singing the blues, and driving a stock car.

Bio

Platform Statement

ML Bettino

ML Bettino is currently Dean of Academic Affairs at Cerritos Community College in Southern California. Prior to that I was Dean of Innovation and Academic Support and responsible for bringing Sakai to our campus in 2004. I have developed and taught online classes since the mid 90s. I have presented at national and international conferences on online education, Sakai implementation, faculty training and student and teacher support. I have a background in psycholinguistics and have written numerous etextbooks. Believing that one day on the water is worth three on land, I surf as often as the swells allow.

I represent 1 of 110 Community Colleges in California and 1 of over 1,036 community colleges in the United States, I was responsible for Cerritos Community College becoming an early adopter of Sakai and have many battle scars to brag about. That experience and my ability to speak to the nature and issues confronting community colleges would be of great value to the Sakai Board of Directors. I would be honored to serve the Sakai Community in this capacity.

Ian Boston

Dr Ian Boston from the University of Cambridge, UK, has been involved in Sakai from the early days. He was responsible for early Sakai tools including RWiki and Search. He took responsibility for the Portal and Kernel in Sakai 2.x and latterly is the re-implementation of Sakai 3.

Ian has a background in mechanical engineering and parallel computing. First degree being in Engineering Design and Manufacture. He holds a PhD in parallel computing and engineering stress analysis. Following his PhD he joined Professor Tony Hey’s group at the University of Southampton to lead research projects in High Performance Computing. In the mid 1990’s he became interested in the startup activity in Silicon Fen around Cambridge and became actively involved in startup companies, sitting on a number of Boards as investor representative and technical innovator. One of those board positions became full time and he became CTO of Procession plc a London based Software House supporting enterprise processes in large organizations world wide. With arrival of a family he joined Caret at the University of Cambridge as CTO, although he still maintains an active involvement in some of the earlier startups.

Ian is an overseas member of the Australian Computer Society, a committer and PMC member at the Apache Software Foundation with the Apache Sling and Apache Shindig projects. In his spare time he enjoys offshore sailing, windsurfing and surfing.

I humbly and gratefully accept the nomination to the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors. It would be a pleasure to serve the Sakai community in this capacity. I have been an active member of the Sakai community since 2004, attending and presenting at almost every conference. I have contributed to the technical development of Sakai, initially with tools like RWiki and a rewrite of the Sakai portal to incorporate JSR-168 and latterly the technical stewardship and evangelism needed to make Sakai 3 a reality. At the Sakai 2009 Boston Conference I was honored to receive a Sakai Foundation fellowship for the second time in recognition of this work.

Over the past 15 years I have served on the Boards of several high technology and software companies. I believe that the experience of serving on these boards and assisting those companies go through difficult periods of growth will be a valuable asset to the Sakai Foundation Board.

In the past 2 years I have become increasingly involved with the Apache Foundation, where, having been honored with committer status, my Project Management Committee membership of both Apache Sling and Apache Shindig has given me valuable insights into the community spirit and meritocracy present within Apache.

I believe that the Sakai Community is at a moment in its history where it has an opportunity to evolve Sakai the product into a world beating platform for teaching and learning and research in education. I believe that we can only do that as a vibrant and diverse community lead by educators and educational researchers, supported by great designers and developers. I hope you will elect me to serve on the Sakai Foundation Board of Directors so that I can play some part in realizing that desire.

Michael Feldstein

Michael Feldstein is author of the e-Literate weblog and Principal Product Manager for Academic Enterprise Solutions at Oracle Corporation. Prior to working at Oracle, Michael was an Assistant Director at the SUNY Learning Network, where he oversaw blended learning faculty development and was part of the leadership team for the LMS platform migration efforts of this 40-campus program. Prior to that, he was co-founder and CIO of MindWires, a company that provided e-learning and knowledge management products and services to Fortune 500 corporations, with a special emphasis on software simulations. He has also been the interim CLO at The Otter Group, a Senior Partner at Christensen/Roberts Solutions, and a Senior Instructional Designer at Raymond Karsan Associates. In prior lives, Michael has been a freelance writer, an English PhD student, a middle school and high school teacher, a tire wrangler at a Yokohama Tire warehouse, and a professional loafer at Schooley’s Mountain County Park.

Michael was a very early participant in Open Source Learning Management Systems projects, having been one of the early participants (and the only non-technologist participant at the time) of the OpenACS community in early 2000—the community that would eventually spawn the GPL-licensed dotLRN Learning Management System. He is currently a member of Sakai’s Product Council and regularly presents at Sakai conferences.

Michael has been a member of eLearn Magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board and is currently a participant in the IMS as a member of its Learning Technology Advisory Council (LTAC). He is a frequent invited speaker on a range of e-learning-related topics including e-learning usability, LMS evaluation methods, e-learning interoperability stnadards, ePortfolios, and edupatents for organizations ranging from the eLearning Guild to the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council. He has been interviewed as an e-learning expert by a variety of media outlets, including The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Associated Press, and U.S. News and World Report. 

I have never been prouder to be a member of the Sakai community. These are exciting times. The platform has improved dramatically in the past few years, adoption is up, and the community is strong. I am particularly excited about the direction of Sakai 3. Going back to my days at the SUNY Learning Network, I have long been a proponent of the Learning Management Operating System--a flexible platform for creating customized learning environments to suit the particular educational needs of specific schools, subjects, teachers and students. Sakai 3 promises to fulfill that vision and more. As a board member, I would do everything I can to support its development while helping Sakai schools establish practical migration paths from the old system to the new that are as painless as possible.

As part of that effort, I will continue to work to foster increasing support and a strengthened relationship for Sakai from my employer, Oracle. I am proud of the contributions my company has made so far. I have tried to find areas in which we have particular expertise that can compliment the strengths of the Sakai development talent pool--especially in the area of open standards, which will be crucial to making the vision of a sustainable and exensible Sakai 3 project practical:

• Working with Unicon, we helped Sakai become the first LMS to integrate with the IMS Learning Information Services (LIS) specification--an open integration standard that we sponsored and led in the IMS. We are now supporting the Sakai 3 Groups project in their goal of building the LIS standard right into the core groups model in Sakai 3.
• When the K2 team was evaluating the OSGi standard as a possible solution for Sakai 3's component manager, I invited one of our OSGi experts to participate in the discussion on-list. OSGi has been around for a while as the component manager of Eclipse, but it's fairly new on the server. It's exactly the sort of standard that can reduce the amount of Sakai-specific code the community has to maintain while opening up new options for extensibility, but it's also new enough that being able to consult with people directly involved in writing and implementing the specification can be very helpful. Our expert's support had significant impact on the architectural decisions that followed. Today, OSGi is part of K2.
• Likewise, when the K2 team was considering an ORM replacement for Hibernate, I brought in the Oracle product manager for EclipseLink, our open source reference implementation of the Java Persistent Objects (JPA) ORM standard. Adoption of JPA (and the reference implementation of it) can help ease development burdens for Sakai 3 while providing more flexibility for implementors. Our expert participated on list and presented at Sakai and Jasig conferences. Today, EclipseLink is a part of K2.
• We proposed that Sakai 3 adopt a proposed Oasis standard called the Integrated Collaboration Object Model (ICOM) for some of the tools in Sakai 3. ICOM is intellectual property that Oracle has donated to OASIS. We have had our ICOM experts consult with members of the K2 team about it, given Cambridge early access to an implementation of an early ICOM draft, and even had K2 members visit Oracle headquarters to learn more about it. If adopted by the community, ICOM has the potential to shorten the development time for Sakai 3 in the short term and provide new and powerful capabilities in the long term. I am personally a big fan of ICOM for Sakai because it can contextualize learning activities, allow for richer evaluations, and facilitate academic knowledge sharing.
• Our UX team has done some work with the Fluid team on best practices, usability patterns, and so on. While this work has yet to yield much in the way of tangible results, I'm enthusiastic about the possibilities. The work that Fluid is doing and, more generally, the emphasis that the Sakai community has put on bringing in usability and accessability experience are largely responsible for Sakai's progress over the last few years from being usability laggards to usability leaders. This can make a huge impact on adoption and innovation on campus, and I'm eager to do whatever I can to bring more resources in to support this effort.
• Finally, my company has also made substantial portions of my time available to the Sakai community by approving my membership in the Product Council, where I hope to help the community improve both Sakai 2 and Sakai 3, with an eye toward easing the transition from one to the other.

If elected, I will work tirelessly, both in my capacity as an Oracle employee and as blogger, to bring support and attention to the Sakai community's bold endeavor to provide superior online academic capabilities, to teachers and students, researchers and administrators.

David Goodrum

David Goodrum is Director of Academic and Faculty Services for University Information Technology Services at Indiana University. As chair of the functional requirements committee for IU’s implementation of Sakai, he was instrumental in developing an enhancements and prioritization process driven by feedback from faculty, staff and students across multiple campuses. As chair of IU’s support and implementation team for Sakai, he has worked closely with the communication and support teams as well as with the enterprise software and infrastructure teams, gaining a growing knowledge of support and training, quality assurance testing, and the technology of Sakai with its underlying infrastructure of application, web, NAS, and database servers. Prior experience -- as Director of IU Bloomington’s Teaching and Learning Technologies Centers, Director of IU’s Kelley Executive Partner’s E-Learning Solutions, and Director of IU’s Instructional Support Services’ Instructional Consulting & Technology unit -- provides additional extensive background in defining and creating services and strategies focused on the integration of instructional technologies into teaching, learning, and collaboration. In all these positions, he has managed multiple projects, employees, partners, and budgets while providing leadership in service definition and direction, instructional design, and partnership and relationship building. 

The Sakai application and the Sakai community are at a pivot point as collectively we face an array of critical challenges: moving R&D efforts to production-ready maturity; building a new architecture and best practices; communicating clear and objective criteria; focusing resources on Sakai 3; continuing to support a robust 2.x platform; and building a migration path forward. At the center of these efforts is a need to create a shared vision of how Sakai supports teaching, learning, collaboration, assessment and portfolio building and sharing.

My regular participation in the Sakai community has been broad with multiple presentations at Sakai conferences over the past five years, a featured presentation at University of Deleware’s Faculty Summer Institute to help kick-off their official involvement in Sakai, and an EDUCAUSE article in the past year with my IU colleagues on the dynamics of supporting Sakai through local and global collaboration. Becoming a member of the new Sakai product council has also given me renewed energy for the challenges ahead.

The future is bright for Sakai and its ability to empower our students, teachers and researchers. I have devoted my career to supporting excellence in teaching and learning with technology. Being a Sakai Board member would allow me to articulate and advocate for the needs of faculty, students, and researchers and in doing so, help to make Sakai an unqualified success.

Feliz Gouveia

Feliz Gouveia is a member of the team of the eLearning project at UFP, a Computer Science professor at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, and Associate Director of the Media Interface and Network Design Labs Porto. Being in charge of the eLearning initiative at UFP, his team has been working on several tools focused on learning and collaboration, and on integration efforts to improve the use of the Sakai platform at UFP, where users voted it the most valuable and used academic service. He led or co-led the Digital Library, the Laptop for All, and several other academic projects.

He has also been involved in several international research projects in the areas of knowledge modeling, information management, conceptual models, learning, and media. He is a member of the Rome Student Systems and Standards Group, and serves in the Board of Directors of the International Society for Presence Research. Prior to joining UFP he was scientific and project manager at a European-wide industry-academia collaborative research institute involving major aerospace, energy and automotive industries.

It is my pleasure to humbly accept the nomination to the Sakai Board of Directors. I have been actively involved in the Sakai project since mid 2004, and we are credited with being one of the oldest Sakai production instances, starting in October 2004. As co-lead of the project at UFP, my team and I have started the design and development of tools that matched the Sakai community most voted requirements, a few years ago: SiteSats, for displaying several site statistics, and UserMembership, an administration and helpdesk support tool. Other tools followed, as well as a Portuguese translation of Sakai. Having a background in Computer Science allows me to be technically involved in the project, while driving it as it best matches our community interests. My team contributes with enthusiasm to the project, and had one member elected as Sakai Fellow in 2008, which was for us a great recognition from the community. I also attended, and gave technical presentations and shared experiences at the European-based Sakai conferences and events, and participated in committees and in the organization of panels. I got to know the community well, its values, practices, rules, and principles.

I strongly believe open collaboration should drive innovation and development in education, and that competition should be based on fair access to knowledge and markets. Being a small institution, we value the community principles of Sakai, and I'll work, as I can, to contribute to the Sakai vision and goals.

Charles Hedrick

Charles Hedrick is Director of Instructional and Research Technology, and Chief Technology Officer, at Rutgers University. His group is responsible for one of the earlier implementations of Sakai, We are now supporting about 55% of undergraduate sections, and one K-12 school district.

Dr. Hedrick has a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from Carnegie-Mellon University. After a few years as a computer science faculty member, he has been a computing facilities manager, initially for the computer science department, and more recently for the central computing organization at Rutgers. His goal now is to provide a bridge between technology and faculty who need to use it for instruction and research. He has published papers in physics, economics and computer science, and done development in a variety of computer languages and environments.

I haven't been sufficiently involved in Sakai politics recently to have specific pre-formed views. The foundation has a difficult problem. We need to encourage innovation but also produce a rock-solid product, with limited resources. There are active groups pursuing these and other priorities, but the foundation needs to look at the relevant processes, and to do its best to develop the resources needed.

Maggie Lynch

Dr. Maggie McVay Lynch has over 30 years in education, with the past two decades working online in some capacity. Her background includes K-12, higher education, and private industry. She has personally developed over 200 online courses for colleges, universities and private industry and supervised the development of thousands. She has taught both face-to-face and fully online courses in Psychology, Education, Business Administration, and Management Information Systems. Her educational background includes a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Psychology, and a M.S. and Ed.D. in Instructional Technology and Distance Education. Dr. Lynch has worked both in academia and in the software industry, giving her a unique perspective on the application of technology and education in a variety of environments. She is currently the Dean of Distance Education at College of the Redwoods, where she provides strategic direction and support for administrators, faculty and students engaged in teaching and learning with technology. She has consulted widely with other higher education institutions around the world regarding e-learning systems development and management. Outside of her many contracts in the U.S., her consulting has taken her to Australia, Canada, China, England, Germany, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and the United Arab Emirates.

Work with Sakai:

Dr. Lynch has been a part of the Sakai community since 2002, and has been a frequent presenter at both Sakai conferences and other e-learning conferences. Her most recent contributions have been as part of the Teaching & Learning Group, developing the evaluation rubric for the Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award and providing input to a number of pedagogical and user-related issues. In 2008 she received recognition as a Sakai fellow.

Publications:

Dr. Lynch has over 50 publications in peer reviewed journals and chapters in books. In addition, the following three textbooks are still in print and frequently used in higher education programs.

• Lynch, M. M. and Roecker, J. (2007). PROJECT MANAGING E-LEARNING: A handbook for successful design, delivery, and management. Routledge Books, London. Taylor & Francis, New York. (focused on project managers)
• Lynch, M. M. (2004) LEARNING ONLINE: A guide to success in the virtual classroom.
• Routledge Study Guides. Routledge Books, London. Taylor & Francis, New York (focused on e-learning students)
• Lynch M. M. (2002). THE ONLINE EDUCATOR: A guide to creating the virtual classroom. Routledge Series in Distance Learning. Routledge Books, London. Taylor & Francis, New York (designed for Instructional Designers, Faculty, and Administrators)

I am honored to be nominated and stand for election to the Board of Directors. I have been a supporter of Sakai since 2002 and have supported the community as it transitioned from a loosely organized group of coders and large institutions into the foundation organization it has now become. I believe my broad background in pedagogy, instructional design, and the faculty and student end user experience can provide a voice on the Board that is critical to further development and adoption.  This is an exciting time for the maturing of Sakai with many opportunities for innovation and collaboration.

If elected to serve on the board my efforts will be directed toward:

1.     Striving for inclusiveness of a diversity of institutions, ranging from K-12 to Higher Education and Business, ensuring that all sizes of institutions have an invitation to, and an understanding of, how they may contribute. This would include identifying a systematic way for contributions in addition to coders, allowing instructional designers, faculty, and students from many institutions to be part of the visioning, testing, and marketing of Sakai. I believe there are many who wish to contribute but don’t know how.

2.      Keeping best practices, pedagogy, and innovative teaching and learning opportunities at the center of development and implementation through using ongoing research to inform our vision and to enhance current systems for sharing information, learning objects, and best practices throughout the community.

3.     Identifying appropriate limitations to Sakai. I believe that Sakai cannot and should not be the application that meets ALL teaching and learning needs. Instead, the community can identify opportunities for linking to or integrating with other excellent development efforts or products. This will allow programmers to focus on the core of Sakai’s capability—particularly with the new Sakai 3.0 vision.

With plans for Sakai 3.0, and the maturing of the Web 2.0 capabilities, the community is now able to actively pursue the collaborative environment that I believe was the innovative teaching and learning vision that began this project many years ago. This new way of approaching online teaching will differentiate Sakai from being “equivalent to another LMS.” Instead, it will be significantly different and more robust. Over the next two to three years, it will be critical to identify new best practices for implementation of this new environment—particularly as it relates to resource and asset management, as well as pedagogy. The 3.0 environment and user interface is very different from the current 2.X. With re-visioned tools and a different way of working both technically and pedagogically, the community will need a lot more support with the change along with encouragement to become even more innovative in collaborative learning. I would love to be part of this effort!

Kerry Sanders

With over 25 years of extensive Business, Education, and Technology Management experience, Kerry Sanders is currently the Chief Executive and Chief Technology Officer for Sanders Consulting, an Information Technology Services company. Sanders Consulting provides technology services to schools, libraries, and other organizations with customers throughout the United States. Kerry is also an Administrator and Faculty member at several local institutions including the Wayne State University College of Engineering, and the Michigan Jewish Institute.

Educationally, Kerry holds degrees in Accounting, Information Systems, Information Management and Technology, and Strategic Management and eBusiness (MILS, MBA). He also holds certifications in the areas of Internetworking Systems and Design. In addition, he has taken several courses in education at the graduate level while earning his Masters degree at the University of Michigan. Most recently, Kerry has updated his skills in the areas of Web Application and Object Oriented Software Development by taking courses in XHTML, and Java Programming.

In previous positions, he has been responsible for Management, Marketing, Development, Training, and Information Systems and Service Management. Throughout his career, Kerry has held several increasingly responsible positions including Computer Specialist with the US-EPA, Assistant Professor at Iowa State University, and executive appointments with the City of Detroit and the Library Network.

In his role as Chief Executive and Technology Officer with Sanders Consulting, Kerry is responsible for providing Strategic Management for the company, as well as providing Technical Direction. Sanders Consulting provides technology services including Systems and Network Consulting, Software Development, On-Line Services, and Training. Sanders Consulting’ EZFilter Web Content Filtering Service has been available for several years, and is used by libraries throughout the United States.

In recent years, Kerry has been instrumental in the usage and adoption of several course management systems including Black Board, eCollege, and Sakai. His roles have included System and Service Manager, Content Developer, and Instructor. He has also been successful in the development and has taught several on-line courses including Intro to Computer Science, Java Programming, Web Programming, XML, Database Management, and Presentation Technologies as examples.

Kerry is seeking to further his education in the area of Education and Instructional Technology. He is currently pursuing advanced studies at Western Michigan University in Educational Technology. This will allow him to refine his skills in developing course content, expose him to new technologies, and enhance his skills in the delivery of on-line courses and the utilization of technology in the classroom.

A resident of Detroit, Michigan, Kerry is a graduate of Cass Technical High School, Cleary University, the University of Michigan, and Davenport University. Kerry is married with four children. He is a Tai Chi practitioner, sometimes golfer, technologist, musician, and life-long learner. He is also the President of the Barton McFarlane Neighborhood Association, located in the City of Detroit.

Chuck Severance

I have been involved in Sakai from the beginning as the Chief Architect of the Sakai Project and later the first Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation. More recently I have had the opportunity to go back into the classroom as a full-time faculty member in the University of Michigan School of Information where I use Sakai on a daily basis. I teach courses in Technology Literacy, Web Site Development, and Social Computing. I work closely with graduate students in the School of Informatics and talented undergraduates in the Informatics concentration.  In addition to teaching, I work as a consultant with the IMS Global Learning Consortium where I help in the development, promotion, and dissemination of existing and emerging standards for the portability and interoperability of both data and software. I have spent the last two years refining and improving standards such as Learning Tools Interoperability, Common Cartridge, and Learner Information Services.  I currently serve on the Board of Directors of the Etudes non-profit corporation which contributes Melete, JForum, and Mneme to the Sakai community.

I continue to contribute technically to the Sakai product as a committer.  I tend to focus my technical efforts on Melete, the Sakai portal, the E-Mail Archive tool, and the upcoming IMS Basic LTI tool for the 2.7 release. While I no longer work full-time on Sakai, having summers off allows me some flexibility in doing technical work on Sakai.  In addition, I recently completed a new Sakai tool that enables instructors to establish simple navigational connections between sites, allowing them to construct simple hierarchies of Sakai sites.

I have also written a book on "Using the Google Application Engine", published in 2009 by O'Reilly and Associates. This compliments my previous book on "High Performance Computing", also from O'Reilly and Associates, published in 1998.

My research focus is the application of technology to teaching and learning. I am exploring how Open Educational Resources (OER) can be best re-used and remixed in new educational contexts. My research has developed a simple, embeddable Collaboration and Learning Management System, using JavaScript which is called CloudSocial (www.cloudsocial.org).  My interest in OER has lead me to work with the Rice University Connexions project (www.cnx.org) - I am writing my next text book titled, "Technology Literacy" using Connexions and it will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution license and my students will be able to get a printed copy of the book for less than ten dollars.  The book will be an experiment in open content and knowledge creation by bringing in my students as co-authors - so they not only use the book during a semester, but they also improve the book for the next semester.

You are welcome to find out more about me by looking at my personal web site - www.dr-chuck.com.  You can find out about the software I have written over the years, online copies of my television programs from the mid-1990's, and my blog posts for the past six years. If you look closely, you can even see me riding a dirt bike, playing hockey, singing the blues, and driving a stock car.

My goal in pursuing a board position is to bring a faculty perspective to the board. As a daily customer of Sakai in a teaching environment, I now view the Sakai product from a very different perspective.  While I was part of the core technical team building Sakai, I always was dissatisfied with the product - all I cared about "What was missing?" and "What was the next big feature that will wow the market?" and "How can we squeeze more new features into Sakai in less time?"  Now as a customer I have a much simpler perspective. My first reaction is that I like Sakai - students figure it out pretty quickly and we get done what we need to get done. The community sees this faculty perspective when we have faculty-focused workshops such as the one held at Virginia Tech or at the recent first-annual Etudes User meeting. At these workshops, teachers are generally positive about Sakai and enjoy teaching with Sakai.  Like many teachers, what I like best about Sakai is its power and flexibility. Since Sakai does not have a built-in pedagogy or selectable pedagogies - I am given a lot of flexibility and allowed to figure things out for myself and as such I can craft a learning experience that fits my course and my students.

Another aspect of my new perspective as a teacher is that I am no longer in such a hurry to get my hands on new features - I am more interested in slow, gentle improvement and stable software.  I still understand that the faculty perspective is not the only perspective that is important and that we must move forward. Without change and innovation we will end up stuck with static software that does not meet our long-term needs.

My other agenda is for Sakai to lead the entire industry forward in supporting interoperable and portable data and software. In order to teach using increasingly student-centered approaches, we don't just need lots of new features - because no single monolithic software product can ever meet every teacher and student's needs across all of education. So instead of focusing on racing towards ever more features - we need to focus on ever more flexibility and options for the teachers and students. Teachers and students must be empowered to build and create the learning environments that they see as best meeting their needs.

Enterprise Learning Management systems like Sakai will always need to provide a highly reliable, highly scalable, feature rich system with a core set of tools that are well designed and work well together. But the system and tools must be infinitely extensible to support the hundreds if not thousands of more focused learning-centered tools. The Sakai 3/Kernel 2 effort will greatly increase our ability to build many diverse tools with Sakai by providing a flexible and scalable content infrastructure to support this new richness of loosely coupled tools.

A critical responsibility of a board member is to represent the legal interest of the public when it comes to the financial aspects of the Foundation. The board provides the essential check and balance to insure that non-profit organizations operate effectively and in the public interest. As a former executive director and with two years experience as a board member on the Etudes (non-profit) board, I hope to bring that skill and knowledge to the Sakai board and use it to help Michael Korkuska in his essential role as our Executive Director.

In summary, I see the future of the Sakai community and the Sakai Foundation as very bright. Sometimes we don't take the time to look back and see how far we have come and celebrate our accomplishments. By moving from a developer to a customer for the past two and a half years, I can see how far we have come and understand why many teachers find Sakai to be such a great product for teaching, learning, and collaboration.

Kim Thanos

I am the Principal of Thanos Partners where I assist the higher education community in improving the quality of technology solutions. I work closely with higher education community source projects, technology vendors and open education leaders.

Thanos Partners (www.thanospartners.com) provides services in market research, strategy, and community development. These services focus on improving both the effectiveness and adoption of technologies by higher education.

The company also strives to facilitate dialogue and action to improve higher education through the use of open educational content, open approaches and open tools. We created The Open Forum for Higher Education Executives, held in December 2008, to increase the incorporation of openness in institutional strategy. I have led projects to increase adoption of Sakai, Kuali, DuraSpace, and open educational resources.

Within the Sakai community, I work to improve communication about Sakai to institutions outside the community through participation in the Market Adoption Group. I present and facilitate sessions at the Sakai Annual Conference. I have also consulted with the Sakai Foundation and the Sakai Foundation Board.

Prior to founding Thanos Partners, I was the Vice President of Technical Services at Campus Pipeline (later acquired by SunGard Higher Education). I hold a Bachelor’s Degree from Boston University and an MBA.

I would be honored to contribute to the Sakai Foundation and community through Board participation. I believe I would bring a unique perspective and set of experiences to the Board.

I believe that it is important for the Sakai community to sustain healthy growth; it is critical to continue to bring new organizations into the community that understand, embrace and enhance the Sakai vision and culture. I have significant experience increasing adoption of technology solutions in higher education and would focus on creating that growth for Sakai. I also have broad relationships across institutions that do not use Sakai today.

I believe that it is important for the Board and the Foundation to nurture and support processes and tools that ease collaboration. I have worked with higher education open source communities, vendor customer communities, and other open education organizations at length to create structures that support rich, fruitful collaboration. I hope to share successes and mistakes of these efforts for the benefit of the Sakai community.

Seth Theriault

I work on research, teaching, and learning systems at Columbia University and was the technical lead for its Sakai deployment.

I have been active in the Sakai community since early 2005, especially in the QA, Release Management, and Security working groups. I have also made presentations at the Newport Beach and Paris conferences and served on panels at several others. In addition, I maintain the Kerberos user provider and its documentation, run one of the original community QA servers (qa2-us.sakaiproject.org), am a member of the Kernel (K1) team, and contribute patches and other ideas to various projects from time to time. I was named an inaugural Sakai Fellow in 2006.

I hold a bachelor's degree in History and French from Washington University in St. Louis and was a Fulbright fellow in France, where I earned a graduate degree with highest honors in History from the Universite de Paris 1 (Pantheon-Sorbonne). I have been an English instructor in France at the high school and university levels, a Unix systems administrator in academia, a journalism graduate student, and a summer intern on the copy desk of the Des Moines Register newspaper.

My wife and I live in Manhattan with our two daughters.

Over the past few years, we as a community have demonstrated that Sakai is a viable collaboration and learning platform. Its unique existence as both a flexible platform and a feature-rich product makes it a powerful and credible choice for organizations of all shapes and sizes.

However, as our community continues to innovate, I believe that the Foundation must provide effective leadership to ensure the availability of a high-quality Sakai. In fact, this need is so important that I think the Board itself must provide visibility and support to this effort, and that's why I am running in this election.

Based on my diverse experience, I feel that a stable and reliable Sakai platform must be complemented by a solid, continuing documentation effort, clear and coherent technical governance, and a more holistic approach to managing releases.

For too long our community has grappled with and suffered the ill effects of the erratic nature of Sakai documentation. In the past, numerous efforts have been made to collect or produce documentation, but much more work needs to be done. A coordinated documentation effort, supported as a high priority by the Foundation, is critical to Sakai's continued success especially as we move toward Sakai 3.

In addition, we as a community must formally establish Sakai's technical governance and complete the transition from a focused, grant-funded project to a true community-source development effort with more distributed leadership and broader goals. The Board must provide visible leadership and support to the technical constituencies as they decide what structures and decision mechanisms to adopt and then present these decisions to the larger community.

We must ensure a holistic approach to the release and packaging of Sakai. Over the past few years, as Sakai has grown larger and more complex, its releases have become more difficult to manage and produce. I believe the Foundation must increase its visible support for release management, as a complement to efforts of the existing quality-assurance working group and the Product Council.

Quality is crucial to the future of an innovative and vibrant Sakai and to the community that created it, maintains it, and will improve it in the future. A deep commitment to this ideal is a key strength that I would bring to the Board.

C. Edward Watson

Dr. C. Edward Watson is the Director of Professional Development and Strategic Initiatives within Learning Technologies at Virginia Tech. He directs all curricular activities within the Faculty Development Institute and oversees Virginia Tech’s ePortfolio Initiatives and Online Course Systems. Eddie has presented several times at Sakai conferences and co-chaired and organized the first Sakai Teaching and Learning Regional Conference in Blacksburg, VA in 2008.  He also co-chaired the Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award during its second round. He currently oversees an institutional rollout of ePortfolios as well as provides leadership for Virginia Tech’s transition from Blackboard to Sakai. In addition to these activities, Eddie also teaches courses using Sakai on change agency and the diffusion of innovations. His book, Self-efficacy and Diffusion Theory: Implications for Faculty Development, was published in 2008, and he is currently co-leading a multi-disciplinary ePortfolio research project at Virginia Tech as part of I/NCEPR.

At Virginia Tech, we are approximately 50 percent of the way through a Blackboard to Sakai transition that concludes in fall 2010. Our university is broadly adopting ePortfolio as a key component of its quality enhancement plan that is part of our current accreditation process that also concludes in 2010. These local activities ensure that I am deeply engaged with Sakai and have a broad understanding of associated support, training, and management efforts.

As we move forward through the design and development of Sakai 3, a clear understanding of faculty and student perspectives will be integral to the process. My first-hand experiences with faculty development and Sakai/ePortfolio training, as well as my own experiences teaching with Sakai, provide me with a deep and rich understanding regarding those viewpoints. My sharing and advocacy of those perspectives will benefit everyone in the Sakai community, regardless of the size of their home institution.

Enterprise-level system administrative and management issues are of great concern to me as well. My dedication to Sakai innovation and pedagogy is therefore coupled with a strong recognition of the needs of the institution. Therefore, I will advocate for clear migration paths from tools in Sakai 2 to Sakai 3. This attention extends to ePortfolio tools as well. We have over 50 active ePortfolio projects at Virginia Tech, and faculty have expressed much interest in tighter integration between ePortfolio tools and other tools in Sakai. Increased functionality in this area is among the issues for which I would advocate. Additionally, due to long-term assessment and accreditation needs faced by many institutions in this era of accountability, easy migration for ePortfolio projects would be another key issue I would support.

Mike Zachrison

For nearly 10 years, Mike Zackrison has been a contributor to and supporter of open source software projects in higher education. However, not being a software developer or college administrator, his contributions have come in different forms. It all started while working for Campus Pipeline as a product manager. He made the first call to Carl Jacobson and Jim Farmer, both of JASIG, to inquire about the possibility of supporting uPortal as part of a new product called Luminis. Since that first call he has directly helped Campus Pipeline, SCT, SunGard Higher Education, Unicon and rSmart collaborate with the uPortal, Sakai, and Kuali communities as well as develop, launch and market product and support offerings for these open source products. Indirectly he has advised Sun, Oracle, IBM, and other partners on strategies for participating in and contributing to these communities. Mike’s work has attracted talent and investment (and code contributions!) to these communities and his marketing efforts have led to the adoption of community-developed software by hundreds of colleges and universities. Mike believes firmly in the advantages of open source software and has witnessed the value that it can deliver in support of the mission of education.

Mike currently leads rSmart’s marketing and product management functions as Vice President of Marketing and Strategy. In this role he is directing marketing activities in support of Sakai and Kuali. Prior to joining rSmart, Mike was VP of Product Management at Unicon, Inc., where he helped start its cooperative support program and established key marketing partnerships with Oracle and Zimbra. In addition to rSmart, Unicon, and SunGard (and its variations), Mike has experience in product management, product development, marketing and consulting at technology companies such as Ingenix (a division of United HealthGroup), TenFold (a software development consultancy), and U.S. Robotics Corp. (acquired by 3Com). Collectively he has experience developing and launching new software products, decommissioning old products and transitioning from older to newer generation products.

Mike received his MBA in marketing and entrepreneurship from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Bachelor degrees in finance and German from the University of Utah. Long ago he lived for three years outside the U.S. in Germany, including short stints studying at the Christian Albrechts Universität in Kiel and the Pforzheim Fachhochschule für Wirtschaft. Finally, he also serves on the board of advisors for Verba Software, based in Cambridge, Mass. Mike resides in Salt Lake City, Utah with his wife and two great daughters (and assorted pets).

I am surprised and deeply grateful for the nomination to be considered for the Sakai board. It would be an honor to serve the community in this way. I realize that my nomination is largely driven by the unique perspective and experience that I would bring to the role and not due to any heroic feats that I’ve rendered on behalf of the community. The heroics, of which I have mostly been a beneficiary, belong to others. Thank you. It is upon the foundation of your labor and efforts that Sakai is where it is today. As a group we enjoy a vibrant community that benefits from an outstanding learning and collaboration product. Getting to this point was not easy.

As a new board member my responsibility would be to do what I can to ensure that the trajectory of the community continues upward. Here are a few ways I can help do this as a member of the board:

1.     Foster Sakai adoption through clear marketing and communications. Much has been done recently to improve the website and create “marketing” materials in support of Sakai. I have been involved in some of this work myself. However, there is always more that can be done, particularly with Sakai 3 coming. I can help.

2.     Foster Sakai adoption through increasing the Sakai ecosystem. To deliver on its full potential as a platform, Sakai needs a vibrant ecosystem that extends Sakai integration more broadly with complementary technologies and content on campus. The Sakai Commercial Affiliates program currently treats all affiliates the same, not recognizing that different partners deliver different kinds value. I have ideas for how to refine the program in order to encourage more participation by 3rd party technology and content providers that can add value to the Sakai platform.

3.     Foster Sakai adoption through increasing the sustainability of the Sakai Foundation. Having a sustainable foundation behind the project is an important part of inspiring confidence in potential users of Sakai. I believe there are fund-raising models in addition to the Sakai Education Partner and Sakai Commercial Affiliates programs that we can explore in order to ensure sufficient budget for the foundation to perform its innovation support role.

As you can see, I believe adoption is important. Greater usage of Sakai leads to more involvement in the community at all levels by a wide variety of institutions. You may agree or disagree with this, but this is what energizes me the most about Sakai—the more people using it, the greater its impact on teaching, learning and collaboration.