About | Jasig Community

What is Jasig?

We are a consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates sponsoring open source software projects for higher education.

We are a non-profit 501(c)3 membership organization organizing conferences in support of open source software design, development, and implementation.

We go out of our way to foster collaboration within and among communities of practice.

History

In late 1999, a handful of university IT leaders with a shared vision began meeting together for the purpose of collaborating and supporting one another in a fairly new technology that showed great promise for becoming a programming standard for the Internet era: the Java programming language. This group--including Carl Jacobson from University of Delaware; David Koehler, then at Princeton; Bernie Gleason from Boston College; later Ted Dodds at the University of British Columbia; with support from Art Pasquinelli at Sun Microsystems and assistance from Jim Farmer of instructional media + magic--began to host semi-annual conferences that would promote education about Java best practices and the cross-campus sharing of tips, techniques, and actual code. Thus was born Jasig, then known as “JA-SIG” the “Java in Administration Special Interest Group”.

Jasig quickly turned its attention to filling an important gap in higher education by embarking on a project to develop an open source campus portal. Ira H. Fuchs, Andrew F. Mellon Vice President, agreed to fund the project, with one important condition. The portal must become a self-sustaining, community supported project. There would be no on-going funding from Mellon. If the higher education community valued the portal, they would need to find a way to make it self-sustaining. The instant popularity of uPortal made this vision come true. Today there are hundreds of uPortal installations world-wide and a large community of contributors.

And so began a model for collaborative, open source software development by colleges and universities, in partnership with commercial affiliates providing support alternatives and contributions of code back to the community.

uPortal’s success was followed quickly by that of CAS, the Central Authentication Service originating at Yale University and supporting secure authentication and single sign-on for enterprise applications. Rewritten and maintained by Jasig since 2004, CAS is now deployed around the globe by higher education, non-profit agencies, and commercial organizations alike.

Over time, Jasig outgrew its "Java in Administration" acronym, morphing to "Java Architectures" and finally to the acronym-less "Jasig" we are today--a community of institutions and affiliates dedicated to collaborative work in support of open source technology and applications for our mutual good.

In 2007, Jasig, learning from the best practices of open and community source projects that have followed it, began its own institutional and commercial membership programs to broaden its governance and to ensure sustainability and growth. Jasig is now governed by an elected board of directors and is supported by project steering committees, working groups, and commercial partners such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, SunGard Higher Education, and Unicon.

Recent Jasig efforts include a process for “incubating” new software contributions brought for consideration and review by the community, with the aim of supporting them to become fully sponsored initiatives.

Governance

Jasig is an incorporated non-profit (501(c)3) organization that exists for the mutual benefit of its members and for the benefit of the academic community in general. It is governed by a member-elected board of directors. More details about the Jasig's operation and governances process can be obtained by downloading the Jasig Bylaws. More

Steering Committees

Steering committees serve as the governing body responsible for the strategic direction and operational oversight of a project. They also act as an advocate for the project and a caretaker of its health and welfare. More

Project Incubation Process

Jasig has defined a process for incubating software projects, components and other contributions into official Jasig sponsored efforts. More