One of this year’s GÉANT Community Awards goes to Scott Cantor (Ohio State University) for his active work over the last 15 years on Shibboleth and his constant involvement in the R&E (networking) community to promote federated access. Scott’s tenacity has been instrumental in making Shibboleth the underlying foundation for federation access: to date Shibboleth is the most widely used software to deploy federated identity management for research and education.
Scott was clearly not even remotely expecting an award; he thought that the email announcing the award was spam and he simply trashed it. It took additional ‘spam’ emails for him to realise that it was actually a legit email.
It is great to see his hard work being recognised internationally, and I for one would like to thank him for all his dedication over the years. His attention to detail when working on specifications, his willingness to give spare time to several groups such as REFEDS, Kantara and others, and his calm approach make this award all the more deserved.
So once more congrats Scott!!
ABOUT Scott
Scott was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, and has worked at the university since graduating there in 1993. He moved from applications to systems programming when he realised how terrible he was at user-interface design. He designed his first Web Single Sign-On system in 1997 and joined the Shibboleth Project in its formative stages in 2001. He became one of the project architects and led the initial design and implementation work, and has worked extensively on all parts of the code base. He was a founding member of the InCommon Technical Advisory Committee and helped launch the federation.
In his spare time, Scott is a TV junkie, cat lover, reader, and enjoys board games.
Find out more about the Community Awards.