On the last day

I started out the day (Wednesday, April 30, 2008) at the Portlets BOF session. A lot of excellent information was shared with us, particularly in relation to Banner. Parker talked about the Maven build system, Maven architects, Eclipse, and Hibernate. They have CAS-enabled their Banner Self-Service pages.

We took in some information regarding portlets and how they are deployed (using the deploy-portlet-app target).

It was suggested that we need a Maven seminar at the next conference.

The General Session presentation by Kaye Howe was entitled "Ubiquity, Interdependence, and the Age of Collaboration". It wasn't a technology speech, but the content was very interesting. The topics included Odysseus, Prometheus (and fire), Faust, the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Rush, the Declaration of Independence, Descartes, and Oedipus Rex. How's that?

I spent the afternoon in an excellent soup to nuts session on uPortal, given by JA-SIG uPortal expert, Andrew Petro. I couldn't really get much to work in the seminar (no fault of Andrew) but did manage to have some success in the airport and on the plane. The session was well worth it for me and will help me immensely in my efforts to understand this project.

On the second day

My goal today was simply to take in the content and not try to be too driven to actually memorize anything from the day.

The morning session included a speech by Ira Fuchs, who is a part of the Melon Foundation that supports so many of the community or open source projects represented here this week.  He spoke of strategic intellectual property (IP) ownership arrangements, the outsourcing of infrastructure (particularly by smaller organizations), the responsibilities of the more well-off institutions in relation to community source, and brought to our attention the real need to integrate high quality marketing into our projects.  He briefly outlined and demonstrated some of the interesting projects being supported by the Foundation, including OpenCollections, VUE, Sophie, SEASR, and Bamboo.  His message was a good one.

The balance of my morning was spent learning the details of portal themes and skins.  It was a relaxing way to spend the time, as it is not an area with which I am entirely unfamiliar, but one in which there are enough gaps in my knowledge to have made it time well spent.  And the speakers were the subject matter experts in the area, so absorbing their understanding of these structures was certainly instructive.

Following lunch - the lunches have been great, by the way - I attended a session by Shibboleth expert, Scott Cantor, entitled "An Overview for Developers".  I'm not sure that it was, but again the information was useful if not exactly what I had been hoping for.  Always looking for the geekiest approach, and that isn't really what this talk offered.

The rest of my working day was spent in a "Birds of a Feather" session on Fedora.  I was kind of the ugly duckling there, not really having any of these feathers, but it was an area that intrigued me having faciliated an earlier session by the presenter, Matt Zumwalt.  The information is something I can take back to my institution and perhaps even make good use of it.

So, in the spirit of the day, I took a bus ride out to the Mall of America to buy a treat for my seven year old daughter, just because she is the light of my life.  She loves Nick Jr, so my trip was a fruitful one - meaning, I got a couple of things Sponge Bobish for her - and I also got to wander around Barnes and Noble and take in a bit of the Minnesota Vikings cheerleading tryouts being held at the mall.

Tomorrow, I intend to have a thoroughly geeky day, which will be enjoyable in a different kind of way.  The conference has provided a nice balance between reflection and some old style learning.  And, perhaps more importantly, I have met some great people.

Busy Day

So, it was a busy day at the conference today.  Following the Leaders Panel, I attended a presentation on Group Management at Duke University (Klara Jelinkova), followed by a JA-SIG CAS Overview (Adam Rybicki).  Note to self: we really need to implement some form of CAS at our institution.

Following lunch, I attended a session entitled "How We Integrated Fedora into Ruby on Rails" (Matt Zumwalt), then took in an interesting presentation on Upgrading uPortal at Johns Hopkins University (Drew Wills and Chris Doyle), and closing the day in a session on SOA and the Swedish Ladok Student system.

All of the sessions were very interesting today, and many of them brought to mind a number of considerations for my institution.

This evening, I attended a poster session and quite enjoyed myself and especially enjoyed the chance to hear about a number of topics from the subject matter experts themselves.

My new word of the day: triplestore.  Never heard that term before today.  Now I've got some googling to do.

Welcome

This blog is intended to be an expression of some of my thoughts on those things related to JA-SIG. This week, I am attending my first-ever JA-SIG conference and so far it has been great. More on that later. Off to a poster session.