JA-SIG Conference

Some things that made last week’s JA-SIG conference in St. Paul the best in recent memory:

• Eight higher education open source communities meeting together for four days
• Five executive directors planning ongoing collaboration
• Great moments in PowerPoint Karaoke history
• Many discussions on community source adoption strategies
• Terrific input from commercial affiliates
• Minnesota sushi
• Some stimulating panel discussions on open source issues
• Excellent progress on the JA-SIG incubation initiative
• uPortal 3.0!
• CAS meets Shib!
• Receptions, presentations, poster sessions, supplementary seminars, aforementioned karaoke spectacular, panels, birds-of-a-feather, Ira Fuchs, Kaye Howe, dine-around night, barCamp, uCamp. So many opportunities to mingle and shmooze; so many opportunities to learn and share.

My one regret:

• Didn’t make it to the Mall of America (Oh well…next time).

JA-SIG Membership and “Giving Back”

Andrew Petro wrote a recent blog post that answers how membership in Unicon’s uPortal Cooperative Support program compares to membership in JA-SIG.

From the JA-SIG perspective, Unicon offers a valuable service to our community. Institutions wishing to outsource or supplement expertise with uPortal and CAS are able to do so by subscribing to the Cooperative Support program. In addition to getting a well-defined path to receiving help with problems, they are able to offer input on priorities for code development that Unicon may do in the interests of Cooperative Support program clients and the larger community. That’s a model that fills a gap and works well for many institutions. As such, it provides an important and convenient choice—one that contributes to the health of a community source ecosystem.

As Andrew points out, Unicon Cooperative Support and JA-SIG Membership are not competitive. They are complementary. So why become a JA-SIG Member, and how is that different from Community Support?

Our membership programs began over a year ago when we realized that our projects and initiatives had outgrown the capacities of a purely volunteer organization with a self-selecting governance structure. Since then, we have encouraged institutions to consider JA-SIG membership as one way of becoming more deeply engaged with the community. When an institution makes a JA-SIG application part of its software infrastructure, it has invested in the future of the application and, secondarily, in the phenomenon of shared, community-driven development. Those investments are nurtured by continued involvement, which helps keep the organization at a self-sustaining level.

Engagement comes in many forms. One very direct form is simply downloading and using our applications. Another is subscribing to our email lists. Some will be readers and will add to their own expertise; others will pose questions, and many will help out with answers–a way of “giving back”. Another form of engagement is attending conferences. Yet another is giving a conference presentation, sharing experience and knowledge. Some of us will write code and contribute it back to the community. Others will test code and report problems or just comment on it—both valuable forms of engagement.

When a school commits to becoming a JA-SIG Member, it engages in a way that says, “This work is important to us and to higher education; we stand behind it in our own interests as well as the interests of our peers.” The fact is, when it comes to community source, we’re all in this together. In the long run, it’s not going to work without participation, without giving back. Engagement as an Institutional Member gives you a voice in the direction of JA-SIG and its projects–through voting and serving on committees and the board—and a means of strengthening and growing the organization. Yes, it makes it a bit easier for you to attend conferences by taking advantage of membership discounts, too. But most significantly, membership will help to ensure that the JA-SIG software you implement is sponsored by a self-sustaining, growing organization of peers, moving forward. By giving back, you give to yourself. And that’s what community source is all about.

What Makes uPortal Unique?

Recently I responded to a query on one of our mailing lists that asked why uPortal was particularly attractive to higher education. After all, there are a number of open source, Java-based portals available now. What differentiates uPortal from the rest of the crowd?

In this slightly edited version of my reply, I suggest that the excellent fit has to do with both some important, distinguishing features, as well as the nature of the uPortal community:

The key features that differentiate uPortal from other products, whether commercial or open source, are the ones that support the complexity, diversity, and decentralization of a typical higher education institution.

uPortal’s Groups and Permissions infrastructure is a good example. Groups and Permissions may be created at a very granular level in uPortal. Rather than high-level roles, a common construct in other enterprise portals, uPortal supports an unlimited number of groups which may be easily defined at arbitrary levels, from the Senior Class to the Elizabethan Drama Club to the Faculty Senate. These groups may then be assigned permissions that allow access to portlets, authorize actions on portal objects, filter news or announcements, etc. Group management may be centralized and controlled by system administrators or delegated to departmental or school-based administrators.

Group members may be derived from any number of sources. Since universities typically store person attributes in a variety of central and local sources–e.g., LDAP, administrative information systems, and other locally maintained group stores–uPortal’s groups infrastructure is able to draw from multiple sources to form a composite service.

Another key feature for uPortal is its very flexible layout management system, which permits tabs, portlets, and fixed clusters of portlets to be served up to users in combinations that are mapped to their personal attributes and subscriptions, or determined by business rules. The latest generation of the layout management system, DLM, contributed by SunGard Higher Education, is unique to uPortal. It constitutes a fine-grained distribution mechanism that makes optional or mandated content available to the diverse campus constituents who access personal data, school information, club news, announcements, and academic or financial transactions through the portal in highly personalized ways.

These features would arguably be of special value to any large, complex group of people that found it important to aggregate information from disparate sources to suit a huge variety of personal interests, while doing business in very customized ways. In JA-SIG’s case, we, built these capabilities into uPortal because higher education felt those particular needs to be acute and no other platform was adequately addressing them.

Which brings me to uPortal’s other strong attraction: our community of developers, service providers, managers, and designers. Higher education’s willingness to share knowledge, experience and local assets surpasses that of most other industries. Because uPortal is a product of higher education, schools and commercial partners have rallied around it to support each other in their mutual interest. So, for example, a request for help on a uPortal mailing list is often answered immediately by a peer. A growing body of knowledge lives on our wiki, and people can often find their answer there. Semi-annual conferences provide a place for framework and portlet developers, designers, and technical leads to learn from each other and collaborate on projects. Newcomers to the conferences are welcomed warmly into the group and given special attention. This energy builds on itself and helps sustain a growing community.

What makes uPortal a particularly good fit for your campus? Feel free to let us know by commenting here.

More on Portlets

What might differentiate a JA-SIG portlet collection from one packaged with another portal product? Well, for starters, a higher education orientation would be an obvious distinction. I can think of a few useful functions that would no doubt provide value to campuses—simple things like Classified Ads, Ride Board, etc.—and have more relevance than the Cartoon of the Day.

Another characteristic—“openness”—could also distinguish JA-SIG portlets from the rest of the crowd. While openness is not synonymous with open source, it is certainly an important value and design goal for us in the interests of portability and interoperability. The unfortunate reality is that, despite the almost universal adoption of the JSR-168 portlet standard, one portal’s portlets actually have a slim chance of running in another guy’s portal. One reason is the inherent limitations of the portlet spec itself. This has spurred portal vendors to cook in extensions to proprietary services, rendering their portlets pretty much bound to their specific implementation.

The case could be made that these hooks are necessary to provide real utility. Even so, there are probably more responsible ways to architect these extensions than we’re currently seeing—pluggable interfaces, transparency, and good documentation exposing the problem areas, among others. It would be nice to say that the uPortal portlet bundle is the collection that will run best in other people’s portals, some necessary tweaking notwithstanding.

A portlet “style guide” for uPortal—and I hope to see one someday—would encourage best practices and civic-minded behavior so that we could brag about having not just the most useful content for higher education but the most “portable portlets” as well.

Sizzle and Spark

One of the high points of the unconference was a home-grown student portal demo by Collier Jones of UMBC. It isn’t a uPortal implementation, but it certainly grabbed our attention. Collier gave us a taste of what he has almost single-handedly accomplished in a lightening talk, one of a series of ten minute mini-sessions with which we began each day of the unconference. The crowd wanted more, and we made sure that a full session was scheduled later in the day.

The myUMBC portal experience is highly interactive and borrows the kind of Web 2.0 techniques that make sites like digg, Google, and del.icio.us so intuitive and easy to use. For example, content on the site that is most highly rated by users appears on the portal home page, in popularity order. (Less popular content is also displayed in random sequence to give it a chance for exposure.) Most portal content may be starred by the user, which causes it to appear in a Favorites box on his/her home page for easy access. A dashboard lets you know when new alerts, emails, and posts are available. A role button lets people with multiple campus roles (e.g., student, staff) choose the content that they want to work with at any time.

The portal is colorful, it’s fun, and it presents users with frequent, delightful surprises: a hilarious image here, a strange sound effect there. A “Page Not Found” message is presented with an astonished squirrel animation. None of this feels intrusive. Rather, in the context of an application that offers so many rich and useful experiences, it gives the user yet another reason to want to come back.

How did Collier do it? First, he went out and talked at length to as many people as he could—students, staff, and faculty—and he asked them what they would like to see in their portal. Then he started giving it to them. He combined that aim to please with a sense of humor, a strong creative streak, some wicked coding chops, and many long days of preparation.

Fun and enthusiasm are infectious. Put them together with a laser-sharp focus on pleasing one’s customers and magic is made possible.

Portlet Farm

An interesting question was raised at our unconference about how to provide support for shared portlets. uPortal has never had much of a portlet story, which has put us at a disadvantage in portal bake-offs. Other major portals—both open source and commercial—typically ship with a bundle of portlets that will run in the portal’s environment pretty much out of the box. uPortal provides a few useful ones, but not a package of comparable breadth.

On the other hand, we are aware of a number of interesting portlets being developed in the community and it would be very nice if there were a good way of sharing them. What’s more, because of the dearth of communication about who’s doing what, we’ve seen instances of redundant efforts where two or even three institutions wind up working on the same functionality. It would be great to harness those efforts when possible and put our heads together.

The unconference discussions centered on a way to make this happen. We’ve certainly got the resources to offer project tools and communication paths to new and existing initiatives. Expect to see more discussion on the lists about creating a process to provide a sandbox for portlet contributions and to “project-ify” (as Andrew Petro likes to put it) those efforts that develop traction in the community. One outcome of this work could be an ever-growing, bundled portlet distribution that is certified to run with each new uPortal release.

Fluid Rocks

I’m not talking molten lava here. I’m referring to the Fluid project, out of the University of Toronto. Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project to help improve the usability and accessibility of community open source projects. The project staff is focusing on a few such projects in its first year, one of which is uPortal.

Colin Clark, Fluid’s lead architect, joined the JA-SIG Unconference along with project participants Barbara Glover, Anastasia Cheetham, and Shaw-Han Liem from University of Toronto and Daphne Ogle and Allison Bloodworth from UC-Berkeley. Besides contributing to unconference sessions, the group led a “UCamp” on Tuesday afternoon that tutored JA-SIG developers in the methods of user-centric design and involved them in mini design workshops meant to address some real UI gaps in uPortal. A core of Fluid members and uPortal developers stayed beyond the official close of the unconference to work jointly on the designs that came out of these workshops.

The Fluid project is still in its early stages, but the work holds much promise for improvements in web application usability.

I’ve been particularly impressed by the way in which Colin and Fluid staffers engage with JA-SIG. They attend our events, contribute to our lists, and otherwise encourage dialog with developers. Rather than trying to impose “the Fluid way” on the uPortal community, they have become active participants, and the value they bring to us is made that much easier to see.

First JA-SIG Unconference

I’m just back from our first JA-SIG Unconference, and I must say I couldn’t be happier with the way it turned out. For those unfamiliar with the unconference format, it’s a self-organizing event — no prepared agenda or presentations — that becomes the creation of its attendees.

We seeded the content with several weeks of discussion by phone, email, and wiki, and we bounded each of the two days with some organized activities for the sixty or so attendees who arrived at the Rutgers University conference center. After a session of introductions and “lightening” talks — brief, volunteer discourses on just about anything of interest — we spontaneously filled a whiteboard with a schedule of sessions that spread out over several conference rooms throughout the day. We re-grouped at the end of the day to process how things went and talk about plans for the following day.

A few things impressed me the most. One, as I told the group today, the degree of creativity, intelligence, generosity, and collaboration was amazingly high. I’m used to seeing that at JA-SIG events. Still, it amazes me to think about sixty people, a third of whom had never even been exposed to our community, creating this experience for themselves, organizing it together in the best possible way, asking and answering important questions, planning future work together, learning and sharing, designing code, and just enjoying each other’s company–all over the course of 48 hours.

I was also particularly impressed by the motivation and rigor with which our gang made really productive strides towards beginning important new initiatives that had been on the back burner for a long time in the areas of licensing, portlet sharing, LMS/portal integration, and project incubation, to name a few. We left the unconference with a list of follow-up activities and go-to people assigned to them. (A number of them have stayed a few days longer to get some real stuff done.)

I’ll say more about the unconference in upcoming posts, but, in summary, I think I speak for most of us by saying that I’m really looking forward to the next one.

Welcome, all…

This is the new home of my musings about JA-SIG. I’m interested in hearing what’s on your mind, too, so please feel welcome to leave a comment…