Hi,
Those mockups are really great and are a great enhancement for the navigation through portals and portal pages. I've shown those to several users (profesors and students) here at UNED and it responds very well to the navigation scheme they expect. So we'll follow your steps and can help to work on it. We can start on august, 1st.
Jeremy, une question: I understand that the "where-we-are" section is the context bar, right? Do you want to remove it only from the main page of each portal or also from inside each aplication? I think these section is useful when you are, for example displaying a news item and want to go back to the news items list.
