Jasig Sponsors the Bedework Enterprise Calendar
San Diego, CA March 8, 2010 Jasig, the non-profit consortium responsible for sponsoring open source higher education technology projects, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) announced that Bedework, the enterprise calendar system, has become a fully sponsored Jasig project, having progressed successfully through the Jasig Incubator.
Bedework is the leading open source enterprise calendar built by and for the higher education community. Bedework will continue to evolve through contributions from a global community and will be sustained by support from academic institutions, commercial affiliates, and non-profit foundations. An initial Bedework Steering Committee has been formed with developer, stakeholder, and Jasig board representation from Rensselaer, Brown, Duke, Yale, Universidad Publica de Navarra, and the University of California at Berkeley.
Gary Schwartz, Bedework Project Manager at RPI, sought to align Bedework with a larger community about a year ago. Jasig seemed like a natural fit. "Jasig sponsorship for Bedework will allow us to meet the requirement that we set forth almost six years ago to make a lasting contribution to open source and higher education", said Schwartz. "RPI sees the stability of a larger community, Jasig's affiliation with commercial service providers, and the consortiums collaborations with other open source projects as factors that will contribute to Bedework's sustainability."
Institutions currently deploying Bedework Calendar have been very responsive to the move. "Individuals at Duke University have been pleased to learn that Bedework is becoming a fully sponsored Jasig project," said Deborah Johnson, Assistant Vice Provost of Administrative and Community Support Services. "This assures us that the Bedework calendar software we use for our Events@Duke calendar will not only receive ongoing support, but will also benefit from a coordinated and more widespread development effort."
The University of California at Berkeley is currently contributing to further Bedework development in the area of personal calendaring. "Berkeley is excited to have the opportunity to be engaged with the Bedework project", said Michael R. Mundrane, Deputy Chief Information Officer for the University of California at Berkeley. "We looked at a number of options before choosing and it was readily apparent that this was a capable product led by an experienced and receptive RPI team. We have every expectation that this standards centric platform will be the key to delivering a high value service to our community."
The Bedework team is in the process of converting the Bedework infrastructuremailing lists, code repository and licensing, wiki, issue tracking, etc.to Jasig hosted servers. This migration effort will be completed in time for Bedework 3.7, the next major release.
About Bedework
Bedework is an open-source enterprise calendar system that supports public, personal, and group calendaring. It is designed to conform to current calendaring standards with a goal of attaining strong interoperability between other calendaring systems and clients. Bedework is built with an emphasis on higher education, though it is used by many commercial enterprises. One may choose to deploy Bedework for public events calendaring, personal calendaring and scheduling, or both. Bedework is built in Java and is suitable for embedding in other applications or in portals and has been deployed across a wide range of environments. The latest Bedework release may be downloaded at http://www.bedework.org.
About Jasig
Jasig is a global, non-profit consortium of educational institutions and commercial affiliates that sponsors open source software projects for higher education. We are a member supported, non-profit 501(c)3 corporation aiming to attract, advance, and sustain global communities developing enterprise-level, open source software that helps institutions fulfill their goals. Jasig connects people, provides infrastructure, and sponsors events that foster innovation and collaboration. Jasig's flagship projects include uPortal, an enterprise portal, CAS, the Central Authentication Service used for single sign-on and secure, proxied authentication, and Bedework, an enterprise calendar used for public events and personal and group calendaring. Jasig now conducts a Project Incubator designed to mentor new open source projects in building community, increasing collaboration, and becoming self-sustaining. For more information, visit the Jasig website at http://www.jasig.org.