Rob Coyle, Johns Hopkins University

Rob has been a member of the Sakai Teaching and Learning community since 2007, most recently serving as Co-Chair of the 2011 Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award, Co-Chair of the Distance Learning group, and the 2011 Sakai Conference Program Committee and Track Lead. Rob is an instructional designer at Johns Hopkins Engineering for Professionals, the graduate degree division of the JHU Whiting School of Engineering. He also worked as the Sakai Functional Administrator and the Project Manager during Johns Hopkins migration to rSmart. Rob is leading efforts to bring innovation from the Sakai community to Johns Hopkins, e.g. leveraging the Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award (TWSIA) rubric to adapt/adopt Hopkins’ course design process.

As Co-Chair of the Teaching with Sakai Innovation Award, he secured sponsorship for the award, proactively identifying increased budget needs, creating new budgets and projections, and securing increased sponsorships to reduce the financial burden on the Foundation. Rob has also worked tirelessly to facilitate refinement of the rubrics, recruit judges, encourage applicants, and manage the evaluation process. He collaborated with Sakai Foundation and Board members to restructure openedpractices.org and improve communication within the larger Sakai community.

Rob continues to advocate for participation and contribution to the Distance Learning group of the larger Teaching and Learning group in three key areas: by encouraging broader participation from Sakai community members, through increasing resource development (templates, courses, best-practices) from the Sakai community to share with other members (Open Content), and developing collaboration with the Teaching and Learning, Learning Lenses group to better contribute distance learning needs into Sakai OAE.

Carl Hall, Hallway Technologies

Carl is a co-owner of Hallway Technologies, a software consulting firm focused on Sakai. Before venturing out on his own to begin Hallway Tech, Carl worked as a research engineer for his alma mater, Georgia Tech. While at GT he focused his efforts on T-Square, the local Sakai 2.x installation, and later partnered with CARET at Cambridge University to begin research and development of the Sakai Open Academic Environment (OAE). Carl is currently a member of the OAE development team, an Apache Sling committer (the project upon which OAE is built), maintainer of the contrib Sakai CLE 2.x Mail Sender project and a Sakai boot camp trainer. When he pulls himself away from the keyboard, Carl is an avid road cyclist.

David Roldán Martínez, Universidad Politécnica Valencia

David joined the Sakai Community on 2005 when the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia adopted the Sakai CLE as its LMS. Since then he has focused on i18n issues as well as contributed code patches to several projects such as Samigo and SiteStats. Currently, he is the Sakai QA lead for Internationalization and is also the Sakai Spanish Universities group leader. One of his main concerns is encouraging world-wide adoption of Sakai with a special interest in Spanish and Latin American adoptions. He has published two books about Sakai: _Moodle vs Sakai_ (Creaciones Copyright, 2010) and _Sakai. Administración, configuración y desarrollo de aplicaciones_ (RA-MA, 2011) and participates actively in conferences and online lists. For the near term, he intends to continue to contribute i18n patches for Sakai CLE 2.9+ in order to improve i18n support in future releases.

Megan May, Indiana University

Megan is the interim manager of the Learning Management Systems team at Indiana University. The group is charged with the development, implementation and support of IU's implementation of Sakai called Oncourse. She’s been an active member of the Sakai community since 2005 and has contributed in a variety of ways over the years.

In 2005 her Sakai journey began with the Quality Assurance (QA) workgroup writing test scripts, executing them and performing bug verification. Her active role in this group lead to her appoint as the Sakai QA Director for just shy of three years (Jan 2006 - Oct 2008) with 50% of her time dedicated to this role. After returning to a full time local position at IU, Megan became heavily engaged in release management and has consistently participated in weekly calls where bugs are triaged, challenges are discussed and recommendations are made on release readiness.

Her involvement in QA and release management led to a complimentary involvement in the Sakai CLE Technical Coordination Committee (TCC) where she currently is serving as the committee chair after 6 months of vice-chairing the committee.

Zhen Qian, University of Michigan

Zhen is a Senior Software Developer assigned to the ITS CTools team at the University of Michigan. She holds a Master Degree in Computer Science, majoring in Database Management Systems from Wayne State University.

Zhen has been an active member of Sakai Community since 2003. She is the lead developer on a number of Sakai CLE projects including Assignments, Worksite Setup and iTunesU. She is also a contributor on several new initatives including Sakai CLE mobile improvements, an Admin Lite tool and MathJax integration. Zhen also helps oversee various maintenance branches, responds to questions on various Sakai mailing lists and assists other developers within the community.

Zhen's CTools team responsibilities include analysis, design and implementation of web-based applications as well as integration of CTools with other core enterprise systems. She is also a member of the CTools Product Tech Lead team with responsibilities to identify and triage CTools production problems.

In her spare time, Zhen is busy with her wonderful two kids and also likes to read when she's free.

Brian Richwine, Indiana University

Brian works for the UITS Adaptive Technology and Accessibility Center and Indiana University and is the current lead of the Sakai Accessibility Working Group. He has as BSEE from Kettering University and has worked for over 10 years in supporting students with disabilities including Accessibility of web sites and other documents and media at Indiana University. Brian has led the Accessibility WG through the process of developing Sakai Accessibility Statements and facilitated the Accessibility Reviews for the Sakai 2.7 and Sakai 2.8 releases.

Brian revised the accessibility testing protocols to include walkthrough scripts that are used to collect functional accessibility information from users of adaptive technology. With data collected from functional accessibility testing and user feedback, Brian and the Accessibility WG have prioritized the accessibility issues in Sakai and are working with developers to create and implement solutions. Brian is mentoring two IU Informatics students to have them gain knowledge in accessibility issues, testing, and best practice coding techniques and having them exercise their knowledge by working with Sakai CLE.