Oren’s Weblog

Bill Clebsch from Stanford is leading a discussion on campus emergency respons

- University-wide Governance Bodies – there are various campus bodies that think they’re running emergency communications. This is not making for a coordinated effort.

Shel notes that at Berkeley the gray areas are around when to declare activation of emergency response systems.

Tracy notes that there tends to be too much focus on systems and technology rather than the process – nobody’s working on the hard problem of how will we get quick responses from administrators who need to activate the systems.

Steve Sather says that at Princeton there’s a good working process for deciding whether the campus closes for snow, so that’s easy to leverage for other emergencies.

At Yale they have telephony tools including broadcast voicemail and some phones with PA speakers. THey have some homegrown tools for sending mass emails. They could send text messages to phones, but don’t have good cell number data.

Steve Sather observes that the usual perception is that when communication happens quickly it’s perceived later as having been a job well done, and when people wait in order to be prudent it’s usually seen as having been not good. The lesson is to communicate quickly and as much as possible.

Princeton has an emergency preparedness task force with executive membership from across the institutions. People who deal with emergencies carry a card with home, cell, work, and alternate phone numbers for all the members of that task force. At Chicago they’ve distributed that info to people in a spreadsheet and taught them how to import that into Outlook. At Berkeley they’ve distributed campus maps and blueprints on thumb drives to emergency responders.

Princteon baught Connect_ED. They did a lot of work to sort the campus community by department, buildings, etc. They tested Connect-ED on May 11. They then used it for bomb threats in grad student housing and the engineering quad. They used Connect-Ed to notify just the people in affected areas – 192 people in one area, 471 in the other. Information was delivered in ten minutes once they decided to deliver it.

Princeton maintains the data on people and then feeds it into the system. This was the first year they’ve asked the incoming class for cell number as part of the regular packet of information they have to fill out. In previous years when they’ve asked students for that separately they’ve gotten less than 20%. This year, because the parents fill out the packet, they have 92%.

Yale is also collecting parent cell-ohone info as part of collecting emergency information.

Collecting information on affiliates who aren’t students or employees is difficult.

People are doing regular tests, ranging from twice a year to monthly.

Technorati Tags: CSG, CSG-Fall-2007, emergency-communication

The rest of the morning was spend in some excellent discussions of data management issues, with presentations from MIT, Washington (Bill Yock), and Berkeley, with some lively discussion. The presentation slides are on the web site, so I won’t try to recreate them.

This afternoon kicks off the meeting portion of the week, with Tom Barton giving an update on grid technology. Tom asked Carlie Catlett, Bob Cowles, Ian Foster, Von Welch, and Christoph Witzig, Jill Gemmill, David Lifka, Jim Pepin, John Paul Robinson, and Renee Schuey, along with Ken Klingenstein what they’d like CIOs to know about grids.

What is a grid? (Jim Pepin) – Grid is an overloaded term. Grid today almost means cyberinfrastructure – different question than what’s a grid in the Globus Infrastructure sense.

Why bother with Grids? it’s a way of pooling resources, as both an economy of scale and because of how science gets done.

Charlie Catlett says “…the biggest problem is identity management”. Witzig says rolling out PKI credentials to everybody is not a viable option.

Teragrid are working on joining InCommon. Their initial plans are to use Shibboleth to the TeraGrid portal, to get TG credentials.

Bob Cowles – “Would you want to fly in an airplane designed using the Storm botnet?” – the resources contributed to the grid need to be high quality.

EGEE is probably the most successful of the grids – European e-science grid. They’ve made the most progress towards federated identity management.

Ken notes that grids are good for finding fungible computing resources, but not for real multitasking.

Sometimes the latency in networks is a real issue (Terry – “Physics Rules”).

Ken – the campus more than the national Grids deserve some play.

Jim Phelps – these things are commodities – they’re in a grid in that some of the people who use them might not be located on campus, but not in the classic sense of being largely available.

Technorati Tags: CSG, CSG-Fall-2007, grids

The meeting opens with a workshop on Shared Media & Data Repositories, and What’s New in Scholarly Systems.

Elli Mylonas and Patrick Yott from Brown lead off the morning talking about Librarians, Academic Support and the Faculty: A dialogue towards planning a digital repository. They enact a conversation between a librarian, a technologist, and a faculty member about digital repositories. The conversation revolves around the tension between a static view of digital objects that allows preservation and access vs. a dynamic view of content that allows for development of the objects over time and reuse over time.

Jim DeRoest, from our very own UW, is talking about the Digital Well asset management system, and how it supports the Research Channel. Digital Well is metadata-centric – the storage is abstracted, which allows for use of different storage back ends. Research Channel has thousands of hours of video stored in the Well, with about 30k objects. The total number of objects in the Well is around 300k ranging from jpgs to high-def uncompressed video (1 hour is several terabytes of data). A good collection to look at is kexp.org – all of the content there is being driven from the Well. The next step is Research1, which will be announced at Internet2. It’s a YouTube-like interface that acts as a portal for research content.

There’s a bunch of discussion of what the funding models for this sort of repository are like. Jack Duwe suggests that one place we might look for business models for “forever” storage is the cemetery industry – what the call “perpetual care”.

Jim Kerkhoff and Peter Keane from the University of Texas at Austin are talking about DASe, their Digital Archive Service. It’s a PHP-based system. This came out of the need to digitize a slide archive in fine arts, containing about .5 million images used in multiple courses. They’ve built it to be flexible, to be able to adapt to changing needs as they emerge, like private collections, modules for custom interfaces, etc. They’re talking about using folders in Xythos as an ingest mechanism for DASe. There’s a question from another campus that’s losing customers to Google Images. Peter notes that it’s very important to remain agile and figure out how to be quickly responsive to needs and understand how to meet the needs.

Qing Dong is talking about Thalia at MIT, an enterprise image storage and management application. It’s designed to support both departmental and personal academic needs, part of a long-germ content management strategy. It’s built on AlFresco, using OpenLaszlo and Flash for the web interface. They’ve built a REST interface.

Tim Sigmon is describing U Virginia’s Academic Information Space, which has a goal to enable users to work with diital resources in an integrated environment. It’s a partnership with the Libraries. The core is the Digital Library (Fedora-based) and the Scholar’s Workbench (based on Sakai and a Fedora-based object repository).

Gary Worley from Va Tech (this must be the Virgina portion of the morning) is talking about how they support digital collections.

Technorati Tags: digital-well, CSG-Fall-2007, repositories

Mark McCahill is talking about Duke’s use of Elluminate Live for synchronous conferencing. It started with a dream for a university-wide web conferencing system, where people could easily create their own meetings. They wanted to integrate with the ID management system and to be able to archive and retrieve meetings on demand.

There are uses for new purposes, like providing live classroom support via web conferencing.

All of the vendors are using boutique proprietary software, whether hosted or locally provisioned. There’s no way to integrate.

Mark shows a video of provisioning a web conference in less than a minute.

Duke’s experience after a year of use is that 308 used the meeting set-up page, with around 636 meeting spaces created, some which have ongoing multiple visits. About 150 meetings have been recorded.

Over 100 departments have used it, about half have created multiple spaces. Most meetings are small, 2-4 participants, 25% have 5-10.

Costs are $2/seat license. There’s a brain (server) plus a cold spare, 2 session pool servers, each running 200 live sessions. Storage space is 50 Mb with screen capture, or 0.5 without.

Support issues – ad-hoc usage peaks outside business hours – 8-10 pm for professional schools, and other hours for the Duke Singapore campus.

There’s overlap here with audio conferences, video conferences, and immersive virtual worlds.

One of the issues is being able to record and archive meetings to standard formats.

In response to a question, Mark notes that there are definitely some learning issues in participating and hosting online meetings, no matter what technology is used.

In discussion, dimdim is mentioned as a new, open, service that is not as full-featured as the commercial offerings but holds promise.

Technorati Tags: CSG-Fall-2007, web-conferencing

Steven is talking about some of the ideas that Microsoft is working on for data interchange – like taking a contact from an address book and past it into a web page – they call this live clipboard, created with scripts on a page.

Steven also talks about the Simple Sharing Extensions for Atom and RSS, that allows bi-directional data synchronization using feeds. This depends on having well-defined formats for data, like vCard and iCalendar.

CalDAV -

There’s a bunch of progress being made on various CalDav scheduling standards drafts.

We had a long discussion about how to handle floating events in free/busy as people travel among different time zones.

EventPub -

VVenue – proposed extension to rfc2445bis that provides detailed information about a place where events occur. It extends the Location property on VEVENT. draft-norris-ical-venue. Next steps include waiting for rfc2445bis to be approved before VVENUE goes therough the process. VVENUE could be used to attach venue information to calendar items from, say, address books, and then publish that info. Cyrus brings up the issue of VVENUE information not necessarily mapping well into VCARD for purposes like import/export. There’s a bunch of discussion on the relationship of VVENUE to VCARD.

Chuck goes on to talk about the Event Sharing Framework, which makes it easy for event owners to publish their event data to the public event space. Data is published into “the cloud”, where it can be retrieved by anyone who’s interested. The EventMap is modeled after Google’s SiteMap. Chuck notes that small organizations don’t necessarily have the amount of technical knowledge needed for providing this event sharing.

XML BOF

There’s a discussion of whether and how to represent iCalendar data in XML – how rich does such a representation need to be, and how faithful does it have to be to iCalendar?

Mobile -

The group has been working on publishing a synch focused Mobile Calendar Interoperability Test Suite. That resulted from a May 2006 survey that found that improved calendar synchronization was high on the desired list by mobile users. They published a white paper recommending the use of iCalendar for syncing.

The purpose of the test suite is to assess a mobile device’s capability to synchronize calendar data with a calendar store. Covers basic calendar and contact synch, but concentrates on known problem areas. There are event tests for Basic Sync (create, update, delete), reminders, long fields and truncation, access & priority mapping, special characters, and multi-byte characters. all day events (with time zone handling), “holiday” events, anniversary events. There are a large number of tests around repeating entries (create, update, delete), bidirectional from server-device and vice versa. There are test cases for scheduling – syncing attendee info, accepting/declining invites, and initiating invitations. There are test cases for time zones and daylight savings time issues. There are similar set of tests for tasks as well as events. There’s a special set of tests for task completion. There are a set of tests for Contacts as well – including addresses, phone numbers, email and URLs. Some mobile devices don’t decompose addresses into discrete elements, which causes problems.

Andrew makes the point that it’s good to have the mobile device makers in the consortium, and it would be even better if the carriers were involved in this activity.

There’s some discussion about how to prepare for an interoperability test event.

The next work item for this group is to work on a white paper on CalDAV implementation for mobile devices.

Technorati Tags: calconnect, calendaring, mobile-devices, mobile-sync