How To Help With a University ICT Strategy? 149
An anonymous reader writes "I have been asked to contribute to my university's revised ICT (Information and Communication Technology) strategy and I am curious what fellow Slashdot members consider to be the main advice in this context. What are the major mistakes that organizations like universities make? Given the complexity of the different participants in a university, how does one have a coherent strategy that fulfills the needs of such a wide audience? How does one promote open source in a managerial culture? How does one deal with the curse of the virtual learning environment?"
Don't push it (Score:4, Insightful)
How does one promote open source in a managerial culture?
By using it only when it's the best solution. Don't push it if it's not the best tool for the job.
Contribute how? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're being very vague. University IT policies have many many stakeholders (Provosts, Regents, President, Deans, department heads, just to name a few) and a lot of interdepartmental politicking needs to be taken into account. Is this a 30k+ student body with hundreds of staff in the IT department or is it student body of 1,000 with only 20 IT people? Is the IT department merged with the library system or is it independent? Does IT bill the other departments for services or do they operate with a predefined budget? Is the reason for getting your input to provide direction for overhauling the IT department's network and services, or is the goal to change the general technology culture of the staff and student body? Should IT be involved more directly with students or are they just a necessary service like janitorial and maintenance? Does IT set policies, or is that handed down by decree from on high? Is the head of IT respected at the same level as the dean of a specific school or is he fighting for attention? Do departments/schools manage their own IT resources does everything have to be centralized?
Perhaps if you were a bit more specific as to WHY the University is asking for your specific input, and WHAT kind of input they expect from you, /. readers could provide you with appropriate responses. The open/closed source debate should only be one tiny aspect of an overall IT strategy, especially in an organization with differing needs as complex as a university. For example, CS/CE departments will certainly need and want a lot of open source tools and systems, but Fine Arts is better left alone with OSX and Adobe CS.
As your question is phrased now, I think your respsonses are going to be mostly of the variety "use/avoid product X" or "push for open source" and not really of much help in providing specific input towards the strategy you are mentioning.
Re:Idealism blows when the rubber meets the road (Score:2, Insightful)
Serious breaches of public safety should be dealt with by security and/or the police. There's no sense in crippling technology that is necessary to the greater student body in order to make things difficult for a few stray pervs.
Politely ignore the faculty. (Score:3, Insightful)
Do the minimum, offer good advice (Score:4, Insightful)
Ethical standpoints can be part of the criteria (Score:3, Insightful)
By using it only when it's the best solution. Don't push it if it's not the best tool for the job.
While that is very valid view to take - choosing the best tool for the job - I don't quite agree with it here. Or well, I do agree but I think that "open source" is a very valid criteria in choosing the best tool.
No, tools aren't automatically superior in security, features or such because they are open source. In fact, deciding to prefer open source harms this because it leaves some of the competition out.
Depending on your political views, how you view Universities in the society might vary. However, if you think that they are supposed to promote freedom of information, openness, be as independent from corporate control as possible, embrace ethical choices, etc. etc... Choosing open source is part of it.
Some people don't believe that those are the reason we need to have universities or that open source helps in those things... I am sure we can all argue about that for dozens of posts and get nowhere. :)
Get Good Advice, then Act On It (Score:4, Insightful)
They ignored his suggestion, and installed whatever was good at the time despite his protests. I think they'll be due to re-trench a couple thousand yards in the not-too-distant future.
Re:Its simple. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only that, but remember about a year ago there was a /. article about a university course discussing strategy as played through Starcraft? Now you need to make exceptions for the rules.
Or my university had a multimedia programming/game development track within the CS department. You bet your ass they need unrestricted access to online resources that would otherwise be seen as non-academic.
The IT department cannot be responsible for determining what is or isn't academically relevant or else they'll end up in a never ending escalation of blocking/bypassing wars that will monopolize time and funds better spent improving the resources available to students and staff.
Gmail and Skype (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Put your personal agenda on the shelf (Score:2, Insightful)
Nonsense: there's a huge difference between promoting the public interest (OSS), versus the interests of a particular corporation or individual — especially when you are working for an organisation whose mission is to advance the public interest (academic/charitable/public sector). One is a virtue, the other is verging on corruption.
Granted it would be a mistake to elevate this above the task of actually getting the job done, but I see no shame in promoting OSS as a matter of policy provided there are no overriding practical considerations.
Re:Idealism blows when the rubber meets the road (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone is jerking off in public, call the cops. There are creeps and weirdos that come to any public place, ever been to a bus/train station? If someone is traumatized by seeing someone jerking off, they need counseling. Not for ther "trauma" of seeing someone jerking off, but because something so mundane made them feel "traumatized". It's gross, not traumatic. You call the cops, have the guy tossed out for indecent exposure, and move on with your life. Years of sexual abuse as a child? That's trauma. Being forcibly raped? That's trauma. Seeing a guy beat off in public? That's unpleasant. Your IT guy wisely realizes that not impeding the access of other, law abiding patrons of the library is more important then protecting some oversensitive co-ed's sensibilities. Briefly glimpsing a penis (I assume it would be brief, it's not like anyone is gonna hold them down and force them to look) is not the end of the world.
Personally, as long as they do it quietly and clean up after themselves, I would rather have guys jerking it in the corner then women at the next table over talking to their girlfriends about their periods and vaginal infections on their cellphone while I was studying. Yes, that has happened to me, more then once.
Furthermore, your admin is also helping prevent you from wasting university resources. Filtering systems DO NOT WORK. Keyword based systems block more legitimate content then illegitimate. Blacklist based systems block only a tiny fraction of sites, and anyone horny and frustrated enough to wank it in a library is going to keep looking until they find something, and will still cause plenty of false positives. A system that forces users to authenticate won't solve the problem because
A. The computers will hardly ever be used, because of the inconvenience, making them a waste of resources in the first place.
B. People will walk away and leave them logged in on a routine basis, making it easy for someone looking for an out of the way place to hop on and look at porn to jump on someones computer (assuming they don't just get their own account) and any evidence will be blamed to someone else.
C. It still requires someone to catch them "in the act", which is what this is all about preventing anyways.
Sounds like he's the pragmatist. He realizes trying to prevent people from looking at porn on library computers is an impossible task, and not worth the effort and inconvenience to the patrons. You are the idealist, with a lofty vision of a world where you can control everything, and people never accidentally see things they would rather not.
Re:Idealism blows when the rubber meets the road (Score:4, Insightful)
Filtering systems DO NOT WORK.
I'd argue that, in an academic environment, they do the opposite of work. Psychology, sociology, biology, anthropology, history, medicine, law, zoology, various arts, and I'm sure several other disciplines might need information that a filtration system would block. Free data access isn't just an idealistic vision, like the GP claims, it's important in a university setting.