Archive for January, 2007

I’m tired of travel

Published January 31, 2007 Other Leave a Comment

Being gone on work trips two weeks in December and two weeks in January have burned me out on travel (though the almost two weeks in Hawaii in the middle helped resurrect my sanity).

I was supposed to be at the CalConnect meeting in Provo at Novell this week, and people had asked me to come to net@edu and CNI, and I was registered for O’Reilly ETech conference in March, and I did want to attend SXSW this year… but I’ve decided to skip them all and stay home and get some work done and spend as much time as I can with my family.

I’ve volunteered to be on the Program Committee for Educause 08 (in Orlando – ugh) so I’ll probably have to travel to the initial meeting of that group in April, and I’ve got an IT Leaders Program meeting in May in Minneapolis. But it’ll be good to have a few months at home and stay out of airports and hotels!

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SOA Workshop with the Burton Group’s Pete Lacey

Published January 31, 2007 Technology Leave a Comment

A group of 30 of us from the UW are spending a couple of days at a workshop on Service Oriented Architecture presented by Pete Lacey from the Burton Group.

It’s a high level overview of a lot of detailed technical concepts, but it’s very useful, and should provide a common starting point for a group of us who are likely to be discussing implementation of services orientation in the technical framework of the UW.

Interestingly enough, while the material in the Burton presentation is almost entirely oriented towards the use of SOAP to implement web services, Pete was surprised to find that we’re also interested in ReST style interfaces. He says we’re the first group he’s given this workshop to that’s even knowledgeable about the SOAP/ReST discussions, and (happily for us), he really knows this area like the back of his hand. He’s an self-acknowledged ReST partisan, being the author of the much-cited S Stands for Simple.

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A couple of days last week at Microsoft

Published January 30, 2007 Technology Leave a Comment

A bunch of us from UW spent last Thursday and Friday getting an extended executive briefing at Microsoft. We got to hear about new and future development efforts on a bunch of the product and technology lines and got the opportunity to meet with some of the product development folks. While the content of what we discussed is under NDA (not that we were privileged to any great secrets that I noticed), I do want to note that, as is always the case when I get to spend time with the actual development folks from Microsoft, I came away impressed by the intelligence and knowledge of the folks that work there. Many thanks to Frank Lobisser, our local MS rep, for putting together a couple of interesting and informative days.

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A couple of days last week at Microsoft

Published January 30, 2007 Technology Leave a Comment

A bunch of us from UW spent last Thursday and Friday getting an extended executive briefing at Microsoft. We got to hear about new and future development efforts on a bunch of the product and technology lines and got the opportunity to meet with some of the product development folks. While the content of what we discussed is under NDA (not that we were privileged to any great secrets that I noticed), I do want to note that, as is always the case when I get to spend time with the actual development folks from Microsoft, I came away impressed by the intelligence and knowledge of the folks that work there. Many thanks to Frank Lobisser, our local MS rep, for putting together a couple of interesting and informative days.

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San Francisco releases study on municipal fiber network

Published January 30, 2007 Politics , Technology Leave a Comment

The city of San Francisco has just released its draft (200 pg pdf file) of a major feasibility study for building a “fiber to the premise” network for the city, titled Fiber Optics for Government and Public Broadband:
A Feasibility Study.

The press release is here.

What did they find?

FTTP is the holy grail of broadband: a fat pipe all the way into the home or business–but in the near future only available for a privileged few located in the limited areas of private-sector deployment.

But private-sector networks3 are not meeting this growing demand for bandwidth and speed in an affordable manner. Though there are private-sector FTTP deployments underway in some, limited areas of the United States, none is planned or foreseen for San Francisco.

In this context of private sector disinterest, municipal FTTP would rank San Francisco among the world’s most far-sighted cities — by creating an infrastructure asset with a lifetime of decades that is almost endlessly upgradeable and capable of supporting any number of public or private sector communications initiatives.

The report proposes building a fiber network first to provide capacity for city government, then to targeted “enterprise zones” in the city, and then to expand it city-wide. The report details various fiber networking technologies and topologies for deployment in San Francisco, examines costs and financing alternatives, and looks at operational options.

This is definitely worth a look, and it will be fascinating to see how the report is received and what comes next in SF.

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San Francisco releases study on municipal fiber network

Published January 30, 2007 Politics , Technology Leave a Comment

The city of San Francisco has just released its draft (200 pg pdf file) of a major feasibility study for building a “fiber to the premise” network for the city, titled Fiber Optics for Government and Public Broadband:
A Feasibility Study.

The press release is here.

What did they find?

FTTP is the holy grail of broadband: a fat pipe all the way into the home or business–but in the near future only available for a privileged few located in the limited areas of private-sector deployment.

But private-sector networks3 are not meeting this growing demand for bandwidth and speed in an affordable manner. Though there are private-sector FTTP deployments underway in some, limited areas of the United States, none is planned or foreseen for San Francisco.

In this context of private sector disinterest, municipal FTTP would rank San Francisco among the world’s most far-sighted cities — by creating an infrastructure asset with a lifetime of decades that is almost endlessly upgradeable and capable of supporting any number of public or private sector communications initiatives.

The report proposes building a fiber network first to provide capacity for city government, then to targeted “enterprise zones” in the city, and then to expand it city-wide. The report details various fiber networking technologies and topologies for deployment in San Francisco, examines costs and financing alternatives, and looks at operational options.

This is definitely worth a look, and it will be fascinating to see how the report is received and what comes next in SF.

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Joining Seattle’s Citizens’ Telecommunications and Technology Advisory Board

Published January 24, 2007 Politics , Technology 1 Comment

I’m honored to say that I’ve joined the The Citizens’ Telecommunications and Technology Advisory Board (CTTAB) for the city of Seattle.

CTTAB has the responsibility to study and make recommendations to the Mayor and the City Council on issues including cable franchising, municipal networking, technology access, and others.

As part of the process I had to go have my nomination to the Advisory Board approved by the Energy and Technology Committee of the City Council today. They told me to be prepared to talk for a couple of minutes. What actually ended up happening was that Committee Chair Jean Godden and Vice Chair David Della asked a couple of questions about my background and what I thought about providing equitable access to technology for all citizens (you can watch the video (requires RealPlayer) if you’re really interested – that part of the meeting starts at about 27 minutes into the video).

What I had prepared to say is, I think, more interesting than what I ended up talking about, so here it is:

I am honored to have an opportunity to serve on the CTTAB.

It will surprise nobody in this room to say that the future grows out of the conversations of the present, or to observe that those conversations are increasingly taking place in ways that we could not have imagined a couple of decades ago, in venues that are enabled by the telecommunications and technology infrastructure that is the very subject matter of this Advisory Board.

The innovative technologies that empower those conversations (such as email, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual immersive environments, etc) did not grow out of any grand government or corporate scheme, but are the product of thousands of individual innovators – engineers and academics, business people and students, people with ideas and the will to make them happen. It’s important that those of us who are knowledgeable and enthusiastic about technology participate in the conversation and work to ensure that those innovations that enhance connections between humans continue to be nurtured and encouraged, and that the environment for individuals to innovate be allowed to flourish.

Thank you for this opportunity and I look forward to working with you on the CTTAB.

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Digital Rendezvous – my ECAR research bulletin on social software in higher education

Published January 17, 2007 Technology Leave a Comment

I’m happy to say that my ECAR Research Bulletin on social software, titled Digital Rendezvous: Social Software in Higher Education is now available to folks at ECAR member institutions. This bulletin grew out of a workshop on social software at the CSG meeting in Spring of 2006, and talks a bit about what features define social software and make its use interesting in higher education, and what the current state of adoption of some of the social software technologies was at the CSG institutions at that time.

It was fun to get to write this piece – the ECAR Research Bulletins are short (12 page) pieces aimed at executive management in higher education institutions. Toby Sitko at ECAR was great to work with on this project, helping me get the bulletin down to the allowable size from my original draft, which was twice as long. It did lose some detail in the process, so if any of you from ECAR institutions are interested in seeing the original draft I’d be happy to share it.

Those of you who are not from ECAR institutions can at least see the slides (pdf) from the CSG workshop presentation.

One thing I’m not happy about is the way that ECAR’s pdf publications don’t allow copying of text to the clipboard. If these publications hope to be influential (and I know they do), then making it easy for people to quote sections in other venues is essential – and having to retype text in order to quote a publication in this day and age is simply a barrier to reuse. Given that one of the most stirring sessions at the recent ECAR Symposium was given by UBC’s John Willinsky on Sustaining Access to Knowledge and Scholarly Publishing, the use of copy protection on ECAR publications seems antithetical to ECAR’s own aims. I know that I myself have been dissuaded from blogging about ECAR publications because of the extra effort involved in copying text into my blog. I urge those of you from ECAR member institutions to let Richard Katz and his crew know how you feel about this – I know I have and will continue to.

Anyway, if you have comments on the bulletin, feel free to leave them attached to this post or send them to me – I’d love to hear them!

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Digital Rendezvous – my ECAR research bulletin on social software in higher education

Published January 17, 2007 Technology Leave a Comment

I’m happy to say that my ECAR Research Bulletin on social software, titled Digital Rendezvous: Social Software in Higher Education is now available to folks at ECAR member institutions. This bulletin grew out of a workshop on social software at the CSG meeting in Spring of 2006, and talks a bit about what features define social software and make its use interesting in higher education, and what the current state of adoption of some of the social software technologies was at the CSG institutions at that time.

It was fun to get to write this piece – the ECAR Research Bulletins are short (12 page) pieces aimed at executive management in higher education institutions. Toby Sitko at ECAR was great to work with on this project, helping me get the bulletin down to the allowable size from my original draft, which was twice as long. It did lose some detail in the process, so if any of you from ECAR institutions are interested in seeing the original draft I’d be happy to share it.

Those of you who are not from ECAR institutions can at least see the slides (pdf) from the CSG workshop presentation.

One thing I’m not happy about is the way that ECAR’s pdf publications don’t allow copying of text to the clipboard. If these publications hope to be influential (and I know they do), then making it easy for people to quote sections in other venues is essential – and having to retype text in order to quote a publication in this day and age is simply a barrier to reuse. Given that one of the most stirring sessions at the recent ECAR Symposium was given by UBC’s John Willinsky on Sustaining Access to Knowledge and Scholarly Publishing, the use of copy protection on ECAR publications seems antithetical to ECAR’s own aims. I know that I myself have been dissuaded from blogging about ECAR publications because of the extra effort involved in copying text into my blog. I urge those of you from ECAR member institutions to let Richard Katz and his crew know how you feel about this – I know I have and will continue to.

Anyway, if you have comments on the bulletin, feel free to leave them attached to this post or send them to me – I’d love to hear them!

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UW Vision discussion blog

Published January 11, 2007 Technology Leave a Comment

UW Provost Phyllis Wise has set up a blog for discussion and comment on the UW’s new vision statement, which includes the great tag line:

Discovery is at the heart of our university

It’s a terrific way of using blog technology, and I look forward to following the conversation!

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