[Announcements] Announcing our 2012 Sakai Fellows

[Ian Dolphin]

A great deal of the work of Sakai relies on the contributions of community members - both institutions and individuals. Every year we celebrate the individuals who have made an exceptional contribution to the community in a variety of areas by recognizing them as Sakai Fellows. The contribution made by Fellows ranges from sharing best practice in learning, teaching or research, technical development and design, to community coordination. The Fellows Programme provides a modest financial allowance to Fellows to help offset the cost of their Sakai-related activity.  It's our way of recognizing, encouraging, and spreading good practice.

On behalf of the Sakai Fellows Selection Committee I am happy to announce the Sakai Fellows for 2012.  Six Fellows were selected by the committee.  Please join me in congratulating each of them!

Ian Dolphin
Executive Director, Sakai Foundation
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Lucy Appert (New York University)

Lucy Appert has been a member of the Sakai Community since 2008, when she and Bob Squillace developed a Sakai CLE-based portfolio for their liberal arts program at New York University that was funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant.  She subsequently became the co-chair of NYU’s Sakai/ATLAS Working Group, a joint faculty and IT task force formed to develop Sakai OAE at NYU. 

Lucy has also been the organizer of the User Reference Group (URG) for the Sakai OAE Project since 2010, a member of the Sakai OAE Steering Group, and an active volunteer on the Sakai Conference Program Committee. Within the Sakai Community, NYU and larger academic communities, she has worked to raise faculty awareness of and support for the new direction in academic technology represented by Sakai OAE.

Lucy is the Director of Educational Technology in the Liberal Studies Program at NYU, where she works with the program’s more than 2000 students and 130 faculty members in New York, London, Paris, Shanghai, and Florence on creative instructional technology solutions. She holds a PhD in 17th & 18th c. British literature and has twenty years of teaching experience, twelve of them at NYU. 


Chris Maurer (Indiana University)

Chris has authored over 900 code commits in support of Sakai CLE development since joining the project in 2004.  Early on he was involved primarily with the Portfolio community (OSP); his responsibilities now include serving as the lead developer for Oncourse, Indiana University's branded installation of Sakai.

Chris is also a member of the Sakai Community's Infrastructure Group and is the lead systems administrator for the Sakai CLE Subversion code repository (source.sakaiproject.org), nightly build server (nightly2.sakaiproject.org) and qa3-us quality assurance server instance (qa3-us.sakaiproject.org).  

Chris is a Principal Systems Analyst at Indiana University, where he has worked for 8+ years. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.


Sam Ottenhoff (Longsight Group)

Sam filed his first Sakai JIRA ticket over seven years ago (SAK-93) and has contributed to Sakai CLE development and QA ever since.  He was a member of Megan May's QA group for the Sakai CLE 2.6 release and for the 2.7 series provided QA support as well as code patches.  In 2010 he joined the maintenance team and also the release management work group, helping triage bug tickets and serving as a 2.8.x branch manager.  He was elected to the Sakai CLE Technical Coordination Committee in September 2011 and currently serves as release manager for the upcoming CLE 2.9 release.       

Sam is a founding partner of The Longsight Group, a company created to focus on supporting open-source applications for higher-ed.  Sam graduated from Kenyon College with a BA in History and worked on an early generation of campus web applications.  After college, Sam worked in New York City for interactive learning company ACTV and then as an educational technologist at Teachers College, Columbia University.  


Sam Peck (Sakai OAE project)

Sam joined the Sakai Community in 2009 while working for a London-based user experience firm.  As the creative lead of the Sakai OAE design team, his work on interface and interaction design helps guide OAE's user-centered, design-led development activities.

Sam is dedicated to ensuring that the Sakai OAE experience helps its users grow and develop beyond what the traditional LMS can offer.  His remit is to provide a user-friendly experience that promotes academic networking, group collaboration and content creation, curation, discovery and sharing--all informed by the needs of educators, learners and researchers.

Sam has been a User Experience Consultant for over 5 years and a Creative Director, Usability Consultant, Art Director and Designer for interfaces, web, applications, devices and various platforms for over 10 years.  He has worked with both start ups and large corporations and government agencies such as Billabong, eHarmony, IBM, Vodafone, Deutsche Bank, UK National Heath Services, UK National Lottery and the UK Government (to name a few). 


Lance Speelmon (rSmart)

Lance is a long-time Sakai contributor who has worked on both the CLE and the OAE.  His recent development work includes leveraging IMS BasicLTI to provide "hybrid" integration points between the OAE and CLE sites and tools.  He also currently serves as a member of the OAE Technical Reference Group.

His association with Sakai actually pre-dates the project's Mellon Foundation grant (2003).  While at Indiana University he worked with Stanford on the Navigo project (Samigo's predecessor) and later joined the CLE architecture team headed by Chuck Severance and Glenn Golden.  He has served as track lead on a number of Sakai Conference Committees and was also seconded to the Sakai Foundation as a staff member during 2009-2010.  

Lance now works for rSmart where he leads Sakai OAE and CLE development efforts.  He particularly focused on developing Sakai OAE agile processes, which rSmart is helping to mature and bring to market.  rSmart has contributed new capabilities and bug fixes to OAE as well as an automation suite around configuration, deployment, QA, and load testing.

Lance writes that "Sakai has been a game changer for me, and I am very happy to be able to remain at the service of the community.  I look forward to continued involvement with the community in as many capacities as I can muster.  It is an honor to be selected as a Sakai Fellow. I am humbled."


Lynn Ward (Indiana University)

Lynn Ward has been actively involved with Sakai and Open Source Portfolio Communities since 2006, first as an instructional design and technology consultant with the IUPUI Center for Teaching and learning and more recently as a business analyst with the teaching and learning division of University Information Technology Services at Indiana University.  In her current position she provides functional leadership for Oncourse CLE, IU's local instance of Sakai.

Lynn is an active contributor to several Sakai working groups, including the Sakai portfolio community, the portfolio visioning group and the teaching and learning capabilities design lenses group.  Last year she helped establish the Samigo working group, which she co-facilitates with colleagues from Stanford, and in January of 2012 she worked with Jon Hays (UC Berkeley) and Robert Squillace (NYU) to lay the groundwork for the "Teaching and Learning with OAE", which now meets on weekly basis.  

She also represents the portfolio community on the OAE User Reference Group and leads an OAE User Needs Group at Indiana University.  She has given presentations about Sakai CLE, OSP, and OAE at the annual Sakai Conference, the annual meeting of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, (ELI), the annual conference of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network, the Assessment Institute, and the annual conference of the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL).

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2012 Selection Committee

Nate Angell (Fellow 2010)
Alan Berg (Fellow 2008)
David Goodrum (Fellow 2010)
David Horwitz (Fellow 2008, 2010)
Beth Kirschner (Fellow 2008)
Nico Matthijs (Fellow 2009)
Megan May (Fellow 2011)
Janice Smith (Fellow 2009)
Anthony Whyte, chair