Dublin, Ireland, May 22nd, 2014
TERENA (Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association) and the GÉANT project present Community Awards to teams or individuals who have shared their ideas, expertise and time in collaboration with the research and education (R&E) networking community, recognising that such contributions are often provided voluntarily and through the good will of their employer organisation.
Jan Meijer (UNINETT, NO) and Stefan Winter (RESTENA, LU) received this year’s Community Awards following open nominations and selection by a panel of judges. Karel Vietsch (late Secretary General of TERENA) was also, posthumously, awarded. Dorte Olesen (Technical University of Denmark), a former TERENA president and now chair of the GÉANT NREN Policy Committee, presented the awards on behalf of the judges during the closing plenary session of the TERENA Networking Conference (TNC2014) on Thursday 22 May.
Jan Meijer was lauded for sharing an idea which was discussed in the TERENA task force TF-Storage, chaired by Jan, and then developed into the open-source FileSender software under Jan's leadership. This simple-to-use, federated, web-based application allows users to share arbitrarily large files with a private audience through a trusted intermediary. FileSender is now deployed by almost 40 national research and education networks (NRENs), institutions and other organisations around the world. www.filesender.org
Stefan Winter was honoured for services to the development of eduroam – the secure, world-wide roaming access service developed for the international research and education community. With roles in the GÉANT project and the TERENA Task Force on Mobility and Network Middleware (TF-MNM), Stefan has led standardisation work, striven for federated solutions, and proposed and developed tools such as F-Ticks for statistics collection and CAT, the universal eduroam configuration tool. Almost 600 institutions have now signed up to CAT, with almost half a million end users who are running a secure configuration that required no effort from them. https://cat.eduroam.org/
In May 2013 Karel Vietsch received Dutch royal recognition for his outstanding contribution to research and education networking and the Internet in general, when he was appointed an Officer in the Order of Orange-Nassau. His work had influenced several prominent Internet organisations and initiatives and Karel demonstrated his commitment to the research and education networking community leaving it a legacy in the form of the 'Vietsch Foundation', which aims to help stimulate the community’s work in future. A first public announcement about the existence and aims of the Vietsch Foundation was made during the TNC2014 opening plenary session. The Community Award judges wished to acknowledge Karel's extraordinary dedication to the community by honouring him posthumously, after he passed away on 23 February 2014. For further information about the Vietsch Foundation, please contact Valentino Cavalli: cavalli@terena.org
