Hello all,

I just wanted to say a few words about the NAV reference committee, which was established just last week.

Those of you who aren't one of UNINETT's NREN customers in Norway may or may not be aware that NAV is one of the many free software offerings to our customers. We even operate remote NAV servers as a service for ~30 of our smaller customers.

We try to concentrate our development efforts to meet the demands of our customers in higher education (HE), and since this is a free software project we also cooperate with some of our HE customers, who regularly contribute to and maintain parts of NAV (some by their own volition, others commissioned and paid by us).

It is not always clear what the customer wants. Some of our customers are very vocal about what they want, others keep quiet, maybe spilling their guts in the occasional face to face meeting (or maybe not even then).

So we've revived a several years old idea to establish a kind of committee of reference for NAV development. This committee consists of representatives from our HE customers, and would be responsible for collecting, massaging, filtering and prioritizing wishes for further NAV development from the HE community.

This committee was established on Thursday 10th November here in Trondheim, and consists of the following representatives:

* Vidar Faltinsen, UNINETT (committee leader/secretary) * Morten Brekkevold, UNINETT (lead NAV developer)

* Gro-Anita Vindheim, Norwegian University of Science and Technology * Børge Brunes, University of Tromsø * Jan Sigurd Refvik, University of Oslo * Rune Kittelsen, University of Agder * Peder Sefland, Volda University College

The committee will publish its work on the web at [1], were you can already find the minutes from the inaugural meeting.

As we're the Norwegian NREN, the committee's working language will be Norwegian - if you don't speak Norwegian, you may want to try using Google Translate or similar services to translate those pages if you want to see the details of what's going on (although automatic translation may confuse more than it helps ;-) ).

Nevertheless, the results of the committee's input will be visible in how we prioritize bug reports and blueprints on our Launchpad project page [2].

Have a great day!

[1] https://ow.feide.no/gigacampus:nav-ref [2] https://launchpad.net/nav