On Monday I traveled to Derby for a meeting of the conference organising committee for the UCISA Management Conference. So, after a year of not being involved in UCISA, I'm back! I thought they might have had enough of me, but apparently not. The conference is in Liverpool next March, and we spent most of the meeting discussing the programme, deciding what our themes would be and who we were going to invite to speak. Now the hard work starts of contacting people, and trying to juggle the programme to accommodate everything.
Yesterday morning was spent discussing the scope of an internal audit which is going to look at security, but not of central systems (we've been done to death on that one), but on some systems out in the faculties which we don't have much to do with.
In the afternoon I went to the second workshop for the Equality Objectives Project, where I'm leading a strand looking at recruitment of staff and students. facilitiated again by Simon Fanshawe and Roy Hutchins, we are really concentrating down now on what we want to achieve. We're researching a number of topics including whether the processes we use to recruit are disadvantageous to particular groups, and what the drivers are for us to recruit in particular ways. Our main issue is how we change the culture surrounding diversity away from a box ticking target driven one, to a culture which sees the huge benefits in recruiting for difference. How do we know what success looks like, and how do we measure it.
Finally, I've been looking back at the tweets about the upgrade over the weekend, and one of the things I forgot to mention yesterday, was that despite all of our filestore and VMs being down over the weekend, our web team kept the website up, and handled over 2million requests to it. Some clever work involved, and I suspect a little bit of magic, so thanks to them.
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