[Announcements] Sakai Product Council

[Michael Korcuska]

The Sakai Foundation is pleased to announce the formation and  
membership of a Product Council to ensure exceptional quality and  
cohesiveness of Sakai product releases in support of varied teaching,  
research and collaboration needs. The formation of the Product Council  
is the result of over 5 years of success and learning of the Sakai  
community in effectively developing community source software that  
enhances learning, research and institutional effectiveness.

The Product Council has two important roles: determining which  
components will be included as part of each product release, and  
informally advising projects as they progress from R&D to production- 
ready maturity.  As a community-developed open source project,  
components of each product release are contributed from many different  
institutions, companies and individuals.  The Product Council is the  
coordinating body for each release, and will work to assure the  
product's evolution continues to meet the needs of the educational  
community in terms of functionality, production worthiness, and  
usability.

More information about the Council structure may be found on the Sakai  
wiki at http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/x/m4RDAw

The members of the Product Council are:

Nate Angell -- Nate works with clients in education and open source  
communities for rSmart (http://www.rsmart.com),  a Sakai Commerical  
Affiliate. Nate previously led web communications at Portland State (http://www.pdx.edu 
) and at the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry (http:// 
www.omsi.org). Nate holds an MA in film,  television,  and digital  
media studies from Brown University.

Noah Botimer -- Noah is the ePortfolio Technical Lead for the  
University of Michigan. He is an open source and open education  
advocate. Before joining Michigan, Noah helped establish a campus-wide  
Sakai course and ePortfolio environment at Saginaw Valley State  
University.

Eli Cochran -- Eli joined UC Berkeley and the Sakai community two  
years ago as a user experience designer and Javascript programmer on  
the Fluid project. After more than twenty years experience in  
interface design and development,  Eli feels that successful systems  
must be more than understandable and usable, they must also be  
beautiful and fun.

Michael Feldstein -- Michael is Principal Product Manager, Academic  
Enterprise Solutions at Oracle and the author of the e-Literate  
weblog. He is a frequent invited speaker on instructional technology  
and has been interviewed about e-learning by media outlets including  
The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Associated Press, and U.S. News  
and World Report.

David Goodrum -- David is Director of Academic and Faculty Services  
for University Information Technology Services at Indiana University.  
In addition he chairs the functional requirements committee as well as  
the support and implementation team for IU's implementation of Sakai.

John Lewis -- John is the Chief Software Architect for Unicon and a 17  
year veteran of the software engineering industry. His passions  
include open source and agile methods. John is active in several  
higher education open source communities, including uPortal and Sakai,  
and serves on the Board of Directors of Jasig.

Stephen Marquard -- Stephen is Learning Technologies Co-ordinator in  
the Centre for Educational Technology at the University of Cape Town,  
where he leads the team responsible for the University's popular and  
widely-used Sakai deployment known as Vula. Stephen is a Sakai Fellow  
and serves on the Sakai Board of Directors.

John Norman -- John is the Director of the Centre for Applied Research  
in Educational Technologies and 'Head of e-Learning' at the University  
of Cambridge. CARET provides infrastructure and support to the campus  
for the use of technology in teaching, learning and research,  
including the deployment of Sakai campus-wide. Prior to this he had  
experience as an engineer and medical devices entrepreneur on 3  
continents. John chairs the advisory board for OSS-Watch and is an  
advocate for open standards and open source software in higher  
education.

Max Whitney -- Max is the technical team lead for enterprise academic  
services in ITS at New York University and an active member in the DIY  
technology communities in New York. She has managed the Blackboard  
implementation at NYU since 2001, most recently acting as the  
technical lead for an enterprise upgrade impacting 45,000 users. She  
also led the Sakai pilot at NYU in 2007. She holds her M.S. in  
Computer Science from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences  
at NYU.

Additionally, the soon-to-be-hired Product Manager will sit on the  
Product Council.

We thank all of those involved in the nomination and selection  
process, and look forward to the contribution of this important  
council in continuing to enhance the academic and scholarly success of  
institutions across the Sakai community.

Best regards,

Michael

-- 
Michael Korcuska
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
mkorcuska at sakaifoundation.org
phone: +1 510-931-6559
mobile (US): +1 510-599-2586
skype: mkorcuska