February 2007 Archives

I've been on the road a lot the last two weeks which implies several things: I've been sitting down a lot, I finally know how to buckle my seat belt in an airplane after all these years, and I've been able to have conversations with people I don't typically have face to face conversations with during a given week. It's that last activity, combined with some time to reflect while flying or waiting to fly that brings me to the following thoughts.

There are examples of good design, service, business all around us. I won't try to call any examples out specifically because I don't want to detract from the main point - but just think of something in your life that you like and why you like it.

I'd be willing to bet that lurking behind that thing you like is a person or group of people who are responsible for its creation, development, design. Whenever I take the time to understand what I like, I usually re-learn that the "product" is the end result of intense discipline to a set of relatively simple principles.

To me, there are two ways to sustain that discipline: enthusiastic belief in the principles and/or enforcement of adherence to the principles. When I think about this in relation to the four themes for ITS in our January all-staff meeting, and bounce it off of the feedback I've received since our meeting we have all of the ingredients to sustain a commitment to those guiding principles: the principles and people who enthusiastically believe in them.

Some have asked about how we'll enforce adherence/adoption and it's a good question. Some others have scoffed at the themes saying it's more of the same and while well intended, won't effect change. Let's start change by investing in those who believe in the themes and would like to help get to where they'll take us and then we can talk about what we'll do if some folks just don't get it. I'd like to think that if we get enough momentum going by focusing on the themes and taking personal action, we won't have to think about enforcement. Enthusiastic belief combined with action can overwhelm the need for enforcement to the point where it is merely an afterthought, and that's what I'm trying to encourage us all to shoot for. How many of us can we get going in the same direction? We'll take score later, after we've got some momentum going.

Recent surveys conducted about how Penn State students use technology suggest that approximately 20% of students have contributed video to a site like YouTube. There are any number of web sites and movements on the internet to promote a democratization of communication, some similar to YouTube, some quite different. I can personally think of several products that aim to put voice (back?) into the individual and route around a publisher of some sort.

Over a year ago I bumped into Democracy TV because of time I spent on a committee on which Mitch Kapor was also serving. He's an interesting guy so I thought I'd check it out. At first, it was clunky and slow and it wasn't clear where content was going to come from. The latest version, 0.95, works really well on my Mac and I regularly find interesting programming on it.

I like messing around with it. You might too.

That's the title of a book I'm reading right now. It's written by Daniel J. Levitin, who grew up learning to be a (and becoming a successful recording/electrical engineer. So far, there's been basic music theory but it is applied to basic physiology and that's what makes it cool. He's also touched on social, cultural, anthropological connections at this point and I believe he'll do more of that later.

I'm compelled to write, however, because of the impact of music on the flight I'm on right now. I was in kind of a foul mood when I boarded and not looking forward to catching up on e-mail. After some music, life is good and the e-mail doesn't feel like a chore. That's pretty powerful. This doesn't mean I've abandoned the campaign to cut my e-mail in half, but it does mean that I'll be going to City Lights this weekend to plop down some dollars for new music.

While at net@edu and CAMP this week, I got reacquainted with a couple of relatively new efforts for IPTV and learned of a new one.

During a session about rich-media in the classroom, Tim Lorang from the University of Washington stood-in for Amy Phillipson and gave a thorough overview of what ResearchChannel.org is all about. I hadn't been there in awhile and I was surprised by the richness of their "catalogue" now. Penn State is a contributing member if you were wondering. And I think their web site is slick - but then again these are the same folks who help make KEXP (my favorite radio station) happen.

Jeff had made me aware of Joost, and I heard people talking it up again at net@edu. Joost is an IP based alternative to television that is getting lots of buzz, in great part because Joost is founded by the same guys who started Skype. Nice track record, huh?

The effort I hadn't heard of before is called Inuk. They are providing VoIP, internet connectivity and multicast television (with an eye on hi-def) to students at universities in the UK over their research and education network, JANET. This would be equivalent to running that service over what Internet2 now calls NewNet (used to be called Abilene).

At the 2007 net@edu meeting in Tempe, AZ I attended a presentation by Kurt Sauer on "Skype in education - implication for product security." Kurt did a high level overview of Skype's architecture and opined on Skype's future as well as other happenings in VoIP. Here are some observations, large and small from his presentation.

-some slides in both English and Japanese
-could we federate into skype? would we want them to use "our" certificates or are we ok with them being the CA and signing relayed transactions if we did federate?
-how are you going to compete with browser snap-ins? answer: mobile is a bigger battleground and we are well positioned for that

Kurt can be reached at kurt@skype.net and his skype name is kurt.

Next, I attended Dewayne Hendrick's presentation called "The Future of Wireless Internets."

-"Reality is under reported."
-"Our congress isn't dealing with reality."
-Looking to Wi-Fi VoIP to undercut cellular based mobile -we, the U.S., are even farther behind in networking than I thought we were and I thought we were pretty far off

Today confirmed what I've been encouraged to wonder about for some time - we (IT at Penn State) must work harder at expanding our field of view in technology to include the whole globe. Our vendors must do it, our university does it - but there are times when I wonder if our (IT) thinking is effected by global thinking as much as it should be. By taking a broader economic, technology and innovation view we will increase the accuracy of our forecasting for new directions.

Last week, I had the opportunity to learn about the Business Intelligence initiative in ITS. Ron Rash asked Marta Miguel, who is leading this effort, to spend an hour and a half with us to help bring me up to speed. I had two big takeaways from our time together.

Marta and her team have spent a tremendous amount of time getting out and talking to many, many people about their business processes, data they use (or don't use) to measure the effectiveness of their practices/services, and data or data views they thought would be useful in the analysis of their work. While the content and nature of those conversations is of great interest, what struck me most was the breadth of the requirements gathering. If your group is doing anything - and I mean anything - that you think might benefit from someone having had these kinds of conversations I strongly encourage you to look up Marta and pick her brain. There's a lot in there :-) .

The second observation is how this project embraces the notion of openness that I wrote about a little while ago. As the phases of this project are completed, as much business data will be available to as many people as it can be - which is a very different place than we are now. Because some of the data in discussion is subject to protections covered in law, this isn't as simple as making all data available to everyone in a coherent fashion (which in and of itself isn't trivial). So the technical challenges are significant from top to bottom but the value of the ultimate outcome will more than validate the time and energy spent on the project. This project will enable Penn State to leverage the collective intelligence in our faculty and employees by more openly sharing data in a form that makes it usable.