Lance D. Speelmon joins Sakai Foundation Board
INDIANAPOLIS -- The Sakai Foundation recently announced the election of Indiana University's Lance D. Speelmon to its board of directors. Speelmon is one of two new board members selected by Sakai's 99 institutional and 13 corporate partners worldwide.
In this role, Speelmon will participate in foundation governance and in determining priorities for Sakai's development of open-source course management tools and its related higher education software for teaching, learning, research, and collaborative applications. He will also help to oversee the advancement of all Sakai products, from design and development to testing, distribution, and troubleshooting.
Lance D. Speelmon
Speelmon is currently the manager of the Course Management Systems group within the Enterprise Software division of University Information Technology Services (UITS) where he oversees IU's Oncourse development team and its ongoing efforts to provide new functionalities that improve user experiences.
"Over the course of his 17-year tenure at UITS, Lance has demonstrated a firm commitment to Indiana University and, more recently, to the Sakai community's shared values of collaboration, information exchange, and innovation," said IU Associate Vice President for Enterprise Software Barry Walsh. "Anticipating that Sakai's near-term plans will include a greater emphasis on the stability of core functionality for Oncourse CL, Lance's presence on the board will be of enormous significance to Indiana University's user base. He richly deserves this vote of confidence from the Sakai community."
Speelmon's earlier experience includes responsibility for high-demand services including authentication, remote access, name resolution, network file systems, enterprise applications, messaging, and collaboration.
"Lance's previous experience and expertise will make him invaluable in leading the Sakai community to even greater technological advances," said Michael Korcuska, executive director of the Sakai Foundation. "We already rely tremendously on his insights and advice, and we look forward to his contributions to the community in his new capacity."
About Sakai
Founded by Indiana University, the University of Michigan, MIT, Stanford, the uPortal Consortium, and the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI), the Sakai Project began as a landmark $6.8M endeavor to develop collaboration and learning (CL) software.
At IU, Sakai provides the basis for the Oncourse CL course management system since January 2005. With over 135,000 users and 92,000 sites, Oncourse CL is the largest implementation of Sakai software to date.
Recognizing that financial constraints are forcing difficult decisions for institutions dependent upon cutting-edge technologies, the Sakai founders have made considerable efforts to preserve sustained access to free open-source software for higher education. With this in mind, the Sakai founders formally established the Sakai Foundation in October of 2005.
