I am pleased to announce the Apereo Fellows for 2015 - individuals who have made outstanding contributions to Apereo projects and their communities.
Alexandre Ballesté
Alexandre started working at IT service (ASIC) of the University of Lleida in 2004. That summer, he participated in the deployment of Sakai 1.0 as the LMS. Later in 2005, he became involved in the first Sakai internationalization effort that allowed Sakai to run instances in different languages. Since then, Alexandre has worked on custom tools, version upgrades and bug resolutions that he says, "made me feel Sakai is an important part of my life."
In 2008, Alexandre worked in the OKI Bus implementation for Sakai in the context of a Campus Project in collaboration with all Catalan Universities. This effort eabled the connection of Remote “OKI Tools” to Sakai and Moodle. Last year, Alexandre participated in introducing WebRTC technology to Sakai by adding a p2p video conferencing mechanism to the portal chat. Alexandre says, he is "deeply attached to S2U (Spanish Sakai Users) that has provided me the enough energy to work with Sakai community for another ten years."
Simon Gaeremynck
Simon has been involved with the OAE project almost since it’s beginning. He has been working on the technical side by contributing code, getting out new releases and maintaining the OAE reference environment. He says, "I love engaging with the community by discussing all things technical (or not) on email lists, hangouts or issue trackers." When Simon is not working behind his computer he can be found somewhere in the countryside on his bicycle.
Gao Jun
Gao Jun has been involved in Sakai community since 2010. As the project manager in Fudan University, he deployed Sakai as the official LMS, which is the best use-case of Sakai in China. After recognizing the value of Sakai, he focused on promoting the usage of Sakai in China and set up the Sakai community in China. Over 20 institutions benefit from all these efforts. As a contributor, he reported over 200 issues to the community and provided Chinese translation and documentation of Sakai.
Lars Kiesow
Lars is a software engineer at ELAN e.V. as well as an occasional lecturer at Osnabrück University. Apart from other free, open-source software projects, he has been involved in Opencast for a long time and is part of its core development group. He has both developed new features as well as helped to deploy free software at different institutions.
Tim Levett
Tim Levett is a software engineer working for the University of Wisconsin - Madison on the uPortal infrastructure team. Tim's contribution to Apereo is vast. He contributes directly to the uPortal project, does uPortal release engineering, helps review other contributions, and has sat on a handful of committees. Tim has a background in Java development and database administration. Tim holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Western Michigan University.
Earle Nietzel
Earle is a Lead Software Engineer at Scriba (formerly Asahi Net Int, formerly rSmart), and has been involved with Sakai for 9 years, he currently is a member of the Sakai PMC, Sakai Core Team and serves as the Sakai 10.x branch manager. At Scriba he is responsible for the development of Sakai. Earle holds a BS in Computer and Information Science from the University of Maryland University College.
Author
Ian Dolphin
Sincere thanks to the Apereo Fellows Committee, who always face a tough set of selection choices!
Ian Dolphin, Executive Director