I'm in DC this week at the Campus Technology 2007 conference. I'm presenting at a session on open source governance in education and so when I had dinner with Jim Farmer and Mike Zackrison i was verifying some facts about uPortal. I had always thought JA-SIG started with uPortal but Jim told me something interesting. JA-SIG started as a reaction to the poor fit of the packaged big 3 (HR, Student, and Finance) information systems for colleges & universities. uPortal has been a great success but it's funny how after all this time it's Kuali that is finally addressing that need.