August 2007 Archives

When I decided to listen to this podcast with Greg Elin (IT Conversations) I thought that there may be some insight about how a central IT organization could operate more transparently, or any organization for that matter. The conversation was about the work of the Sunlight Foundation, work that is directed at making more transparent the transactions of the federal government.

There were some desired lessons and ideas extracted but there were many more fascinating concepts that were discussed and analyzed.

The more the conversation went along, the more I was hearing inisght that might help us as we begin to wrestle with the notion of a Penn State framework for repositories. Repository is such a loaded term, but the generalized nature of this podcast made it applicable to any area I can think of including administrative, raw and intermediate research data, blogs, wikis, web sites, meeting minutes, etc.

The notion of agile development, not just as a software development methodology but also as a project management methodology was brought up again and again. I know there are folks in ITS and all over Penn State who are talking about and have embraced both concepts. We're having lots of discussion about project management in ITS right now - I highly recommend a listen from that perspective too.

The Sunlight Foundation has established something call the Sunlight Labs to help execute their ideas. The foundation doesn't fund a small handful of large projects but rather a large handful of smaller projects, and the lab is their to support and coordinate those efforts. The way it was described it sounded like something we might try and emulate in some places at Penn State.

The conversation was mostly about how to make data available in a useful, coherent, permanent way (sounds like a repository to me). The rallying cry of the efforts of the foundation is one-click discovery. They talked about APIs they've developed to help identify people and legislation across data silos, using Opensecrets.org and OMBWatch as examples of two well intentioned and well serving repositories who until recently, couldn't work together for a whole host of good reasons.
gapminder

The concept of Continuous Data Analysis was presented. There are many concepts relating to log analysis and business intelligence that I think would be well served as we consider the future of both. Also, I was introduced to Jeff Jonas, a chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytic Solutions group and an IBM Distinguished Engineer. He is the father of a concept called Sequence Neutrality in Information Systems.

Lastly, but early in the podcast, there was mention of gapminder.org. I had never heard of them before - they claim to be a "a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development." There are some cool and interesting tools for data visualization on their web site.

The podcast was 44 minutes long but worth every second. I highly recommend it.

1 government agency...

18 sponsored participants...

43 members...

1.3 million people...

so far.

This is the current lineup of people, organizations, and companies impacted by the InCommon Federation of which Penn State is a member. With each passing semester, this organization and the trust fabric it helps to weave is making a big and positive difference in the daily information experience for Penn Staters.

NIH, library vendors, software vendors, third-party hosted serice providers, and man dozens of our peers are all connected. And during this academic year, we will see a handful of very large, very well known technology companies join in.

Some have criticized the speed with which InCommon has achieved its current size and stature. In some efforts, such a pace would be fair game. But the trust business is different than a pure technology business so some deliberation is to be expected and tolerated - mostly because it is necessary. Keep an eye out for more information coming out of InCommon and Penn State's involvement in it.

Beloit College released their MINDSET LIST® FOR THE CLASS OF 2011 . The incoming class of 2011 carries with them a very different perspective than most of "us" do. It is highly recommended reading and a quick way to begin to come to grips with what makes our student customers tick. My personal favorite is, "They were introduced to Jack Nicholson as “The Joker.”

I listened to a short and relatively old (from the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference) podcast and this quote appears in the first 90 seconds. That was enough to hold my attention for the next 15 minutes or so. The title of the podcast is "Auto-buddies: Connecting Relevant Strangers."

The speaker is Lee Dryburgh and he is a self-described telecommunications protocol engineer who is on a journey to seek value in the connections that the protocols enable. His web site goes into quite some details about what he talked about at this conference.

He talks a lot about context sensitive attribute assertion with a not yet articulated but important to have authenticity. He ties it into reputation (one of my favorite topics) and how this can all make for a much richer digital experience that also leads into a richer analog experience, particularly when tying this all into proximity. This is where, I think, Cole Camplese's recent blog posting "The Intranet — Gee, That’s Exciting" might very well collide nicely with some of the work that comes out of the Penn State Identity and Access Management Group.

Many of the concepts I've heard/thought/discussed before but his take was different enough to be provocative. If you haven't thought about these kinds of things before, it is a good 15 minute listen.

Somewhat recently a new organization in higher education has been formed called ITANA, IT Architects in Academia. You can get an idea of what they are all about by reviewing their web site.

In ITS at Penn State, we don't have people with the title of "architect" in our organization but we do have people who have "architect" all over parts of their job description. We've launched a new group and initiative in ITS to bring together some of these types of people in our own organization on a regular basis. The launch memo for ITS-ITANA should help paint the picture of what we're going to ask this group to do in its first year.

We have more people in ITS that think and "do" architecture than would make sense to try and pull together to be productive, so I trimmed the list of possible participants to what I thought was a good number to get started. One of the meta-issues we'll have to tackle in this first year is how to handle membership to keep the group fresh and vibrant. Also, if we have a good first year and learn how to make this work, we'll want to consider doing the same thing or something similar for IT at Penn State. But we're going to take a year to see how to make this idea work before trying to grow it.

I'm not physically tired. I'm tired of no comments. So, I'm doing a poll. Please follow the instructions carefully.

1. Start your favorite web browser.
2. Type the letter "r" in your location bar as if you were doing old school surfing.
3. Post a comment and tell everyone what site first appears for auto-completion.

Mine is predictable, I'm curious what comes up for you.

The work that has been on going with the Penn State CTSA effort is entering a new phase of development. The steering committee is starting to meet more regularly and a draft document describing the proposed work and scope of the eight groups has been created. As part of this effort, each group was asked to develop an IT impact/needs statement. There are some interesting trends to be gleaned from this collection of needs. I encourage everyone to read them and see how existing efforts might be oriented to help begin to solve some of the IT challenges that are facing well over a hundred faculty at Penn State.