bierfaristo blogs

Yesterday, I participated in another two sessions related to developing a master plan for the library. The first was about computing spaces. On their first slide, they had labeled it "OIT Spaces", however, which drew a fairly strong response from the campus CIO and Director of OIT. "I thought this was about the library -- Nobody told me that this was about OIT space." The consultants were abashed and apologized for not using the correct term, but I thought it was a good example of how the upper administration builds processes that are blind to what actually happens on the campus. The announcements of these sessions made it sound like they were "teaching tip" workshops, rather than having anything to do with developing a master plan for campus space. But I digress.

I thought the session had too much "reading of the slides" by the consultants. We can read the slides -- really. You really don't need to read that long list of buzz words.

I said several things that probably made some people angry. In particular, I talked about the fact that the networking business model left 2/3 of the network in the ISB dark. The NSM networking group had tried to get control of the wired network so we could build out gigabit ethernet and make all the jacks live, but we lost that battle and got only 300 jacks turned on. This has resulted in a nightmare where most of the network jacks don't work and the spaces are not reconfigurable. You want to move the printer over there? Sorry -- that's the only place with a network jack. The jacks there, there and there? They're turned off. Their solution is that everyone should use wireless, but that doesn't work for the huge datasets that we have students building. There are jacks in all of the student study areas, but they're all turned off. And even in the labs, half of the jacks are turned off, so it's always a guessing game: does this one work? No. Does this one work? No. And, when the issue was raised the OIT response was that the building was "overwired".

I also gave my speech about what the campus would look like if it were built like "Spark" -- the webct/blackboard CMS. If the campus were like Spark, it would only have one door and you'd have to swipe to get in. When you got inside, you would only be able to see the doors that you're allowed to walk through. Everything else happening at the University would be invisible. MIT has their "open resource" policy: all of the courses at MIT post all of their resources openly. Why does a private university do that and our public university locks everything behind a door. And the campus itself doesn't do that. Did anybody check IDs of people at that meeting? Of course not -- even though I found out that at least one person had crashed the meeting without RSVPing.

One guy who was there was a professor of Computer Science. I wonder if I rubbed him as wrong as he rubbed me. He said that Computer Science didn't maintain its own computer labs anymore because students all just used their own laptops. I pointed out how we monitored our students and were aware that not enough of them had laptops to enable us to do that, but that we also wanted to be sure we could present a consistent and functional environment because the students' computers all had different versions of software where the software was also often broken or misconfigured. "Yeah," he said. "I've spent lab periods where I spent all my time trying to help students who had different versions of things who couldn't find this menu or open a kind of file." I pointed out that one solution was to use open-source software because then every student could install the same version. His eyes turned into big red X's: "Well, I'm a Computer Scientist and I can tell you that you should never trust that Open Source Software -- it's full of bugs and is always broken." I think my mouth must have fallen open. What planet is this guy from?

I did meet the new OIT guy who support's Apple systems. We had a good conversation and then walked over to the ISB so I could show him around and talk about our support structure and issues. He said he'd invite me over to see their enterprise next week.

I also met the new technologist at the library and said I'd give her a tour of Morrill so I could show her some of the best and worst spaces on campus. I also told the DEGW people to visit the Intro Labs in Morrill. We built those a dozen years ago and they've been incredibly successful.

It did show me how insular and lucky we are in the Biology Department: we've had the freedom to build and support great stuff. But it means that we don't always see the culture in other departments, where people take issue with the very idea of "group work". We need a lot more transparency on campus to shine light into the dark corners that are full of dust and cobwebs.