Three and a half years after its formation, Unizin is facing its biggest challenge. Now that the consortium is dealing with contract renewals (membership based on three-year agreements), and now that it is a standalone organization and not wrapped under Internet2, Unizin will face the future without its top management.
There’s a lot more here than just a change of one or two executives, and we plan to share more analysis next week here at e-Literate. We have also reached out to get comments from the various people involved. For now, however, here are the basics.
This week there were two board meetings in Austin, TX – one for Unizin and one for Kuali – due to the logistics of having several people serving on both boards. We have confirmed based on multiple sources that after a meeting with the Unizin executive committee but before the board meeting, CEO Amin Qazi turned in his resignation. One day later, after the board approved a new interim CEO, COO Robin Littleworth turned in his resignation.
The interim CEO is Rob Lowden, Associate VP Enterprise Systems at Indiana University and long-time active member of the Kuali community and prior to that in the Sakai community (including board positions in those two open source organizations). To the best of my knowledge, Lowden will remain in his job at IU while at the same time running Unizin until the board selects new executives.
Expect more from us next week.
Update: Clarified timing of resignation.
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