Ira H. Fuchs to deliver keynote address

Moving Community Source to the Mainstream: Overcoming the Obstacles to Adoption.

JA-SIG is very pleased to announce that Ira H. Fuchs, Vice President for Research in Information Technology at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will be the Tuesday keynote speaker at JA-SIG's upcoming St. Paul conference, "Higher Education Solutions: The Community Source Way"', Sunday through Wednesday, 27-30 April 2008, at the Crown Plaza Hotel.

Abstract:

Community source software has begun to benefit a significant number of institutions worldwide, yet those institutions still constitute only a subculture in global higher education. Why doesn't every campus use open source for services beyond the Internet and Linux? Why don't more institutions participate in community source development? This presentation will examine the legal, economic, organizational, and psychological impediments to widespread acceptance of community source and what might be done to overcome them.

BIO:

Ira H. Fuchs joined the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2000 as the Vice President for Research in Information Technology. Mr. Fuchs directs the Foundation’s expanding grant-making and investigations of digital technologies that can be applied to teaching and research.

Prior to joining the Foundation, Mr. Fuchs was Vice President for Computing and Information Technology at Princeton University for 15 years where he was responsible for the overall management of the University's telecommunications and academic and administrative computing services. He earlier served as Executive Director of the City University of New York’s central computing facility and as CUNY’s Vice-Chancellor for University Services.

In 1981 he founded the BITNET Network, the first and world’s largest academic telecommunications network, and for 20 years served as Chairman of the Board of its successor, the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN).

Mr. Fuchs was a founding board member of the Usenix Association, The Internet Society, and JSTOR, where he also served as Chief Scientist. Mr. Fuchs currently serves on the Boards of Sarah Lawrence College, the Princeton Public Library, the Philadelphia Contributionship, and JSTOR.

In 1999, Mr. Fuchs received the first Technology New Jersey Internet innovator award and in 2000, Mr. Fuchs received Educause’s highest award for “Excellence in Leadership”.

Ira's keynote address is scheduled for Tuesday, April 29, 2008, at 8:30am.