Networking

At the end of last week following the UCISA meeting I went to the RUGIT awayday - tortuous travel arrangements between Manchester and Warwick meant that I missed the first couple of hours, but got there in time to hear an extremely good presentation and question and answer session with the Registrar from the University of Warwick. Of course, we concentrated a lot on the financial pressures facing Universities at the moment, and looking at how we are going to have to work together to get through them. Two points I thought were particularly well made were -
- we mustn't allow the government to divide and rule us,
- we have to get involved in the debate and not let others set our future vision and direction.

Other sessions over the two days included a presentation on CampusM (from me - getting good at it now!), the future of desktop computing and the benefits of a centralised IT service as compared to a devolved one. Lots of good discussion, and as always at these events, a lot of very useful networking.

Today, some of us visited the University of York to discuss our approach to collaborative software with them. In particular they were interested in the implementation of our collaboration environment uSpace (based on Jive SBS software). Lots of interesting questions - most of which we knew the answer to. And I even got to do my CampusM presentation again! Again, excellent networking and exchange of ideas.