BIO/EXPERTISE
Ira H. Fuchs is the Vice President for Research in Information Technology at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation where he directs the Foundation’s program dedicated to supporting the application of information technology to a wide range of scholarly purposes. Open source software initiatives supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation include Sakai, uPortal, Kuali, Sophie, Zotero, the Open Knowledge Initiative, Bamboo, CollectionSpace, DecaPod, Fedora, DSpace, FLUID, OpenCast, SEASR, and the Visual Understanding Environment.
Prior to joining the Foundation, Mr. Fuchs was Vice President for Computing and Information Technology at Princeton University where he was responsible for the 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 Systems.
In 1981 he founded the BITNET Network, an important precursor to the Internet, 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, and Ithaka.
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.
General Session II - Thursday
8:30am-10:00am
Amphitheater
Ira H. Fuchs
Vice President for Research in Information Technology
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
RESOURCES
Video of this Session (Requires iTunes or Quicktime Player)
ABSTRACT
In 2000, with the creation of the Program in Research in Information Technology, the Mellon Foundation began to explore the possibility that higher education institutions might do better by building their software collaboratively. Now, almost ten years and more than 50 collaborative projects later, “community source software” is a recognized phenomenon in higher education, having tens of thousands of installations and millions of users worldwide, and involving developers on every populated continent. Fuchs will discuss the current state-of-play in community source software development, highlighting projects having particular relevance to NJEdge. He will also provide an assessment of community source as a maturing social-production model: what do the projects do particularly well? In what areas do they need improvement? What are the remaining challenges