Quick round up

A quick round up of the last couple of days.

Most of Wednesday I was in a meeting of the design team for the New engineering Building, which will have a lot of student led, IC type space in it. Designed by the same team who did the IC, its getting to the exciting stage now. We've got some great ideas for the external appearance, and the internal layouts are being firmed up. More details soon, but here's a picture of what it might look like.

Yesterday I was in Oxford for a meeting of the organising Committee of the UCISA Management Conference. Agenda coming along nicely now, and some changes and innovations in format being introduced.

This morning I was in a three hour workshop on procurement - and it was interesting and informative! We were looking at where we wanted to be strategically in terms of procurement - lots of issues raised and debated.

Now I'm disappearing for a couple of weeks somewhere hot. See you when I get back. 

Graduation part 2 lol

A couple of days ago I blogged about some things we were doing to make our students and their parents and friends experience of graduation a bit more interactive. I'm pleased to say that the gigapixel photos are up and a huge success. Very high definition, you can zoom in to individual faces, tag them in Facebook, and take a screenshot of you or your friends and post it to your Facebook wall. Thanks to Ed Miller of Re-Axive for doing them for us, as well as graduating himself.

The live video stream is also working well - we get many students each year who we either can't give enough tickets to for all of their family to attend, or their family and friends can't attend for some reason - too far to travel or illness for example. The live stream this year is high quality ( but will be better next year, we're already working on it!), and designed to cope with a high number of users. There's a steady stream of a few hundred people looking at it, and our stats show they're from all over the world. So far, so good. Yesterday afternoon we noticed that the viewing numbers had shot up to over a thousand, and about two minutes of detective work traced this to the brother of one of one of our graduands tweeting to his many followers:

"Guys my sisters university is live streaming the graduation! When I get the link I want you guys to flood it like crazy!!!! IT'LL BE EPIC"
And:
"Everyone! Bombard this link"

Clever eh? What was particularly clever was that it took us about another two minutes to work out who he was and pinpoint the exact seat he was sitting in. :-) So, we were able to have a quiet word with him after the ceremony. Just to point out that if he had brought the stream down, which he had been exhorting his followers to do, he would have stopped parents, brothers, sisters, friends, from all over the world seeing their loved ones graduate. Of course, he behaved in the arrogant, cocky way we expected, and we even got a lol tweet afterwards:-). But, no harm done, our stream coped easily with about 1,700 viewers, and it's a lesson to all of us that part of our planning and risk analysis always has to include the idiot factor!






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Gigapixel, taggable graduation images are here

This week is Graduation Week - I always enjoy it, and try to get to as many ceremonies as I can. Makes me realise why we are all here!

This year we've introduced two new things which hopefully will be popular with the students and their families. We're the first UK University to take high definition images of the hall just before the start of the ceremony.  These "gigapixel" images, which are normally reserved for high profile events such as the Royal Wedding, are being taken by one of our own students, Edward Miller, who will be graduating at one of the ceremonies he will be photographing. Ed won the Sheffield University Business Planning Competition earlier this year, and is setting up his own business Re-Axive. Building on our use of  social media, the pictures will be taggable through Facebook. You'll be able to see them here from Tuesday 17 July. We're also going to use Ed's skills to take some interactive 360degree photos of the campus.

The other thing we're doing this year is streaming all of the ceremonies live. We've experimented in the past with web cams, but this is the proper stuff.  You can watch them here, at  0930, 1200 and 1530 all this week. Each one last about an hour. I particularly like the bit where the students stand up and applaud their parents and friends. Not a dry eye in the house!  If you're watching on Thursday lunchtime, you should get to see Martin Fry get his honorary degree.

And we've got another press release out - that's three this year :-)

Well Connected

Was pointed at this last night by a colleague - a website and a mobile one for our students who have mental health and wellbeing difficulties. It's called Well Connected, and is in beta at the moment. I thought it was a nice example of using the web and social media to help our students.  Developed by colleagues in Student Services with a lot of input from students,  especailly the outgoing and incoming welfare officers. We also had a hand in it, on the project board and the design. There's a good video showing the ideas behind it:

Service Strategy Board

Service Strategy Board yesterday. Another good meeting - always lots to discuss. As usual we went through  reports from all of our projects as well as getting reports from all of our service managers.

Particular things we looked at included:

• A review of our recent filestore upgrade. This had a timeline of everything that had happened, and focused on lessons learned, and made a number of recommendations for future such events. The timing of this one hadn't been easy, it had to come before our VLE upgrade, and it did have the potential to disrupt some exams processing, which is one of the reasons the work was carried out through the night. We discussed whether we should have a dedicated upgrade/downtime window during the summer, but discounted it as it was felt that users would expect all work to be done within that period, which would carry its own risks, and it would be difficult to time. We agreed that we would probably  always have to build at least one downtime window into our planning for the summer, and we would have to ensure that our customers understood the reason for this, but that we would arrange the time in order to cause as little disruption as possible. 

• A proposal to build more formal gateway reviews into all of our projects. This will be at major milestones, and will give SSB the opportunity to consider strategic priorities  at key points, and contribute to the consideration of project options.

• A proposal to look at providing a mobile print service to allow students and staff to print from all of their mobile devices. The first stage of this will be to assess demand.

• A proposal to implement a mobile app for our VLE.

• A revised service catalogue - our first major review has taken place.

And I thought I'd share this with you - you'll know I was at the JANET Brokerage last week, and I admired their new mugs. So they sent me one. This is how it arrived. Well, that's the Brokerage for you.

Janet Brokerage advisory Group

Today I've been in Harwell at the Advisory Board for the Janet Brokerage. Lots of interesting discussions, can't report on all of them for commercial reasons, but will try and give a flavour of things covered.

The Brokerage are talking to major cloud service providers, and we had a report on negotiations with Microsoft about their 365 service. Work is being done on standardising contracts, terms and conditions, and different licensing offerings to the sector. Other cloud providers will also be approached, including Google.

We also confirmed what the eight suppliers on the framework agreement offer. In summary:
Collocation at tier 2 and above
IaaS, including VM ware, public, private, community and hybrid clouds
Combined procurement
Complementary services eg consultancy, planning and managed services.

Use cases include off site data centres, Disaster Recovery, hybrid virtual infrastructure, cloud burst and research infrastructure

There's an event coming up soon where we will be able to ask the suppliers what they can do for us, and for them to find out what it is we need. It's a speed dating event, and details are here.

The brokerage are also working with other bodies including UCISA on costing of IT Services, with the hope of producing some sort of calculator or modelling tool. Knowing the total cost of services is an important part of any cloud or outsourcing decision making process.

During the day I learnt about Moonshot, a project looking at authentication and federated access to applications in the HE community led by JANET. looks interesting, and of particular use by researchers.

Finally, we had a demonstration of meaning based computing from Autonomy. Using their Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), very intelligent and contextual searches can be carried out across multiple data sources, looking for patterns. Think searching emails from Barclays Bank looking for evidence of rate fixing.... The can also search media, including in socialedia looking for trends, looking for what people are saying about you, your brand, your product, and giving it a positive or negative rating. Unfortunately I had to leave to catch my train before the end, but was very impressed with what I saw, and could see an application for the intelligent and contextual searching in the research collaboration space.


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Think before you post

Today one of our local legal firms ran a workshop for senior Professional Service managers on Social Media.  I was a little nervous at first, as I didn't want it to be full of the legal pitfalls and put people off, but I needn't have worried. It was an excellent session, very interactive with a lot of discussion around issues that everyone needs to be aware of. I began with a quick overview of how we use social media in the University, and particularly in CiCS, mainly Twitter, Facebook and blogs. We then had a round table discussion about how other departments, including the student Union, our accommodation service and the Library use it. What soon came out was that this is not something you can do as an afterthought. It requires dedicated resource at a reasonably senior level, and constant monitoring. It's also interactive, and questions need to be responded to, conversations need to be completed.

Then we had a look at some of the pitfalls and how things can go badly wrong. From misguided marketing by Habitat to posting from an official account, instead of your personal one. Some of the risks you have to be aware of include damage to the University's reputation, liability for defamatory material, infringement of IP, data protection breaches, and making contractual agreements. All of these risks can be mitigated if you control who has access to your official account, having some guidelines, and agreement about content and messages, and being positive, helpful and friendly.

Of course, we all make mistakes, and how you recover from them is very important in a medium as fast and pervasive as twitter. Do you take down the offending material, or respond, or apologise, or make a joke of it? This is a really good example of how to do it.

In terms of personal use, one of the hardest things to deal with in the workplace is bullying and harassment issues.  We had a discussion bout whether we need guidelines on the use of social media for all of our staff - at the moment we don't. Our view has always been that our existing policies - on use of IT,  on bullying and harassment, on bringing the University into disrepute, should be robust enough to deal with any form of media. Similar discussions took place when email was first implemented. Our values, including respect for our colleagues, should also be applied to all forms of communication.

Finally, we had a quick look at how third party social media sites can be handled if defamatory or misleading information is posted on them.  I particularly like this example of a response.

And we ended on a very good piece of advice - "Think before you post".  Something that Michael Ruse would have been advised to do.

Annual Report and Newsletter

Every month we send a newsletter to all staff and students (different ones - tailored to the information they need), and this month's has just gone out, and with it our Annual Report for this academic year.  As usual, our comms and design and print teams have done a great job - it looks good, and I hope people find it interesting. For the first time we've made it available to mobile devices using Google Currents, thanks to our web team. You can see the newsletter and get links to the pdf and mobile versions of the Annual Report here.


Here's the Currents version on my iPad, I think it looks great:

Computation meets knowledge

The final session yesterday was a talk from Conrad Wolfram, strategic director and European co-founder and CEO of the Wolfram group of companies. He is the person behind Wolfram Alpha.

He was great!  Started by explaining that we'd gone from a situation where knowledge was difficult to get, to a situation where we are overloaded with information  and we find it difficult to get to what we need. It's going to get worse! Data will soon be bombarding us from everywhere. Everything from personal medical devices monitoring everything about us, to domestic appliances, not forgetting government data and financial data.

He believes that Computation is the answer and that Computation is for everyone!

Wolfram alpha is a computational engine, and he demonstrated some of the queries it can do in real time - such as calculating the  GDP of the UK. Then comparing it with BP's share price. My favourite was when he put in cous cous plus rhubarb. Try it. you get all sorts. Or, you can just ask it,  "Am I drunk?"and it will bring up a blood alcohol calculator.

They've launched a format for interactive documents called CDF - the computable document format.
So, you don't get dead documents, but you can change stuff on them and it recalculates the answer. Really useful for things like pension statements.
There's some great apps on the Wolfram demonstrations site. Go have a look.

I was impressed that he demonstrated live app authoring, on stage. Took about 60 seconds:






A good question - how many of us can ask  linguistic questions of our ERP systems? Can we say to SAP, "how much holiday have I got left?" The answer is clearly no, but he believes this is the way we should be going.

Finally, he talked about how he believed that we had to change our education paradigm, especially in Maths. Summed up in this TED talk:




Great end to a great day.
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More lightning sessions...

Founder, Tech for Trade
Interesting project to use to 3D printing in the developing world. More here, including a video.

CEO, SpotOne Global Solutions
Helping Africa get access to technology. Work with investors, technology providers, donors, software developers and resellers. Bring technology into villages, including mobile phones. Apps for Africa competition.

Founder, AMEE
Avoiding Mass Extinctions Engine.
Set up to measure the footprint of things.
Looking at systems collapse. Species. Corals. Marine dead zones. Global freshwater quality.
Don't have adequate data to make good decisions.
Lack of reliable and consistent time series data.
Started with aggregating all worlds environmental standards into one platform. Then make it easy to interrogate and report on.
Then built an environmental intelligence system within collects data from many sources, sensors etc. Can calculate environmental footprint of anything.

Co-founders, Technology Will Save Us
Make DIY technology kits. Show people what their capable of by lowering the barrier of entry to technology. Kits contain components and instruction to inspire appreciation and production of technology. Range from musical instruments to speakers. Also tools like soldering kits. Not just kits, but educational experience. Workshops, and hands on courses. Even how to wire a plug. Soldering for kids. Also teardown everyday appliances to show how they're made. Had a toaster tear down day.

Great set of speakers and presentations.


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How is the Internet developing?

Next was a panel session on How the internet is developing? How has the world changed through events like WikiLeaks, Occupy, the Arab Spring, SOPA/PIPA, and what are the driving forces behind these? How do we protect the open web where citizens can share content and express themselves freely? The panel was made up of some prestigious members including Rick Falkvinge, founder and first party leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Member of the Icelandic Parliament for the Movement, Ahmed Maher, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and co-founder, April 6 Youth Movement and Ivan Sigal, executive director, Global Voices.

Lots about coalition building, and keeping coalitions going. All have used social media in some way.

I was particualry interested in the founder of the Swedish pirate party. He was disillusioned by way that swedish parties were treating connected young people. So, he put up a web page to see if he could get 220000 votes. Got it, and more. Got 2 seats in european parliament. Have already changed things. Got 25% of under 30 vote. Most coveted because people tend to stick with how they first vote. Virtually no campaign budget.
Used connected lifestyles of young people.
Normal lessons from marketing are wrong. One message doesn't fit all. Need to communicate vision, and then release control of it, and let all activists in your movement translate the vision in their own social contexts.
Have to be visible. Get supporters to wear t shirts with pirate party on. Had them on nearly every square in the country. Need to bridge the on lone and off line. Provide role models, and make people feel included.

Also interesting was Global voices, a community of writers and translators who amplify local voices, using citizen media and social media. For example, they translated tweets from a Japanese worker during Fukushima disaster. Coming to a conference like this which is so different to the ones I normally go to, is always good for discovering new things, and I had found their web site fascinating. Especially because it's bloggers rather than journalists.




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Media in exile

Next talk very political, more media than technology, but I'll write about it anyway because it's important.

It was on Media in Exile from the station manager of SW Radio Africa. Short wave and internet radio station in Zimbabwe.
Quick summary of the situation in Zimbabwe at the moment. Unity government, Mugabe still holds power. Opponents still being arrested, intimidated. Farms attacked. Murder and beatings. No food. Violence continues. Horrible pictures of victims a I couldnt look at some of them. Key architects of violence are army.

SW radio started because Mugabe challenged Capitol radio which she ran. Had to leave country. Now run from UK. Feels like groundhog day, living same day over and over again. They report on stories that other places don't. Even the UK



International community turns a blind eye to to blatant human rights and legal abuses in the region. They publish data, such as names of Central Intelligence Organisation and the abuses they'd committed. Facebook extremely useful, and people reported abuses through that. Also exposed financial deals, illegal gold, plunder. Again, Facebook is extremely useful. Use it to set up interviews. Anyone who's anyone is on Facebook. Dot tweet or blog. Political parties keep their eye on it.
12million population, 9 million mobile phones, 1million on Facebook.

Diamond fields have been discovered in Zimbabwe. Chinese are in there, making deals with Mugabwe.

Will be interesting next election. Changing point. All they can do is ensure that they highlight and name human rights abuses in the hope that they can make a difference and end the misery.


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Lightning case studies

Next are 4 five minute lightning case studies. Interested to see how this


format works, as I'd like go introduce it at some of the events I help to organise. There's a gong to stop them after 5 mins!


International ambassador, EP Foundation
Nfp organisation in Poland for open data. Wanted to open up Polish government web site. Worst web site, all closed. 2 of them built tools to open it up. Now open. Even simple things like letting people find their MP and track their activities. Also track legislative process. First time Polish people have been able to see and understand process. Also built a freezer app, can see what laws are being held up. Now using it to engage with the community.


Co-founder, Open Knowledge Foundation
Build technologies and communities to develop, disseminate and use open knowledge. Lots of projects, working groups etc.
open spending, aim is to track every government financial transaction across the world and present it in useful and engagement forms for everyone to understand from children to data geeks. Very difficult. Huge amounts of time to get data, FoI requests etc. Also not all in same format. Loads of questions being answered. Overseas aid, levels of debt.
Fascinating talk. Look at the website.

Founder and CEO, PUBLICi
Open, independent community news platform. Allows independent writers to create their own newspaper. Reporting has changed. Twitter, Facebook, social media has changed journalism. Indepenedent press important, PubilcI provides a platform, and also brings together popular stories, things that people are elooking at. No paywalls. no censorship.

Programme director, Witness
Empowering users to use video for human rights, cameras everywhere initiative. 72 hours of videos uploaded to YouTube every minute, including activitists. Citizen media can play key role in human rights. But, issues in using this for legal processes and evidence. Videos as evidence require validation etc.
How do we harden citizen video so it becomes acceptable. Smartcam project. Informacam, Inserts metadata, uses GPS, confirms which camera its come from, where, encrypted data etc. New human rights channel on You Tube.
YouTube/humanrights


Very good session, and you can get a lot across in 5 minutes, certainly as a showcase of something you've done.



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