January 2004 Archives

I've been trying to hire a Senior Manager for User Support for almost a year now. Why am I having such a hard time? Maybe I'm looking for the impossible - a seasoned professional in managing user support in a complex higher ed technology environment.

But in the course of looking, I've seen a *lot* of resumes. And I have to say, I am shocked by the extent to which it appears that people don't even read the job description or requirements before submitting their stuff. Hey - if I wanted a unix sysadmin, or a .net programmer, or a graphics person, I would advertise such a job.

That's why I really liked Joel on Software's article on Getting Your Resume Read. Check it out if you're looking for a job, or even thinking of sending your resume in.

A résumé is a way to get to the next stage: the interview. Companies often get dozens of résumés for every opening ... we get between 100 and 200 per opening. There is no possible way we can interview that many people. The only hope is if we can screen people out using résumés. Don't think of a résumé as a way to get a job: think of it as a way to give some hiring manager an excuse to hit DELETE. At least technically, your résumé has to be perfect to survive.

John Parres points out this BBC report that Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno are launching a new musician's union to help artists in the digital age.

"Some think that we want to cut out parts of the music business, but that's not the case," Gabriel said.

"We need a model partnership where every artist should have a controlling influence in the whole production process - if they want it."

Tracy Mitrano points out this article from yesterday's NY Times Magazine titled the Tyrrany of Copyright, by Robert Boynton.

Like Rachel Carson in the years before Earth Day, the Copy Left today is trying to raise awareness of the intellectual ''land'' to which they believe we ought to feel entitled and to propose policies and laws that will preserve it. Just as the idea of environmentalism became viable in the wake of the last century's advances in industrial production, the growth of this century's information technologies, Boyle argues, will force the country to address the erosion of the cultural commons. ''The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently,'' he writes, ''to see that there was such a thing as 'the environment' rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment. We have to 'invent' the public domain before we can save it.''

And while I'm on the subject of lists...

The Pho email list had a discussion at the end of the year of everyone's top 5 music choices of the year - here were mine, in no significant order:

• Rodney Crowell, Fate's Right Hand (Introspective country songwriting at its best).
• Al Green, I Can't Stop (He gets back together with Willie Mitchell and the rest of the old Memphis gang and gives the gospel a break for a secular outing - just as soulful as ever).
• Dave Douglas, Freak In (a nice updating of the electric Miles Davis sound by a young lion).
• Keith Jarrett Trio, Up For It (Live in Juan-les Pins) (the art of the jazz piano trio at its current apex - three masters engaged in unbelievable telpathic communication.)
• Joan Osborne, How Sweet It Is (released in 2002, but I didn't get to it till this year. A genuine homage to 60s-70s soul by one who can pull it off with respect and panache).

Now that I look at it, a pretty retro sort of list, but it's been that kind of
year, at least for me.

Trying to catch up after a hectic week or two....

I got asked by a reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education for my opinion on what the top trends in IT in higher education will be for 2004, and what they should be paying attention to for possible stories. After confering with various colleagues around here, my list looked like this (in no significant order):

1. The penetration of open source software into higher ed (general software like Linux, Apache, Mozilla, Chandler, etc, as well as higher-ed specific stuff like OKI and Sakai).

2. how security issues are changing the face of IT in higher ed.

3. the success (or not) of legal music/video download services among
students and what that means for the copyright wars.

4. the evolution of ill-named "course management software".

5. student use of IT for self-expression (blogs, photo albums, web pages,
etc) - It's not about grades, courses, courseware, etc.

6. blurring of the boundaries between higher ed and k-12 and community colleges, enabled by IT and new edu-models (suggested by Louis Fox)

7. electronic portfolios -- their development and uses (suggested by Louis)

8. Year Of Desktop Collaboration, i.e. if/when desktop video, IM, chat
will morph and/or become usable and used on a daily basis by the masses. (suggested by Terry Gray)

9. continued practical research on IT cutting edge development at
universities that gets commercialize (Larry Dalton, Center on Materials and Devices for Information Technology Research (http://stc-mditr.org/centout/index.php))

10. The adoption and continued development of Internet2 middleware like Shibboleth.

Kevin Laws, guest-blogging in Tim Oren's Due Diligence weblog, has written a good essay on the current state of the music industry.

Just to save you the suspense - the bottom line:

"The industry tips...over"

Now go read it!

Terry Gray pointed me towards the 20th anniversary version of Apple's famous 1984 super-bowl ad. Hmmm, does the runner appear to be wearing something distinctly not available in 1984?

We had the first meeting of the group advising OSAF on the development of Westwood, the version of the Chandler personal information software that is being designed specifially to support higher education enterprises. We got an update on the progress toward the Canoga version of the product (the first version, designed for individuals to share information on a peer-to-peer basis). We dicussed the security model issues at some length, and I think we raised some good issues and had a productive morning. My notes from the meeting are here.

Just as an aside, I am really impressed with the incredibly open manner in which OSAF is doing its activities. How many companies or organizations do you know who post all of their weekly status reports on the Web for all to read? I think it's a model that many of us could use.

And, as long as we're talking about Chandler and OSAF, there's an article about OSAF and Mitch Kapor in the current issue of United Airlines' Hemispheres magazine.

Supporting IT in higher education is an interesting challenge. In many ways large research universities resemble small countries more than tightly organized businesses - they are very decentralized places where individuals schools, departments, research units, etc, have enormous autonomy and can choose whether or not to support their own infrastructure. Some departments at our institution have extremely large and highly competent computing support staffs, while others have little or no support.

There is a constant discussion about how best to organize IT support at this kind of institution - what best serves the users, what is most cost-effective for the institution, how different actually are the different units in their support requirements, and so on.

This morning at CSG there was an interesting session on how some of the member institutions are dealing with distributed support. I had to leave the discussion early to attend the Chandler Westwood advisory group meeting, but the notes I did take at the session are available here.

David Pogue, in his NY Times column reports here on an interview with Steve Jobs this week.

First, he said, on a video player, "there’s just no equivalent of headphones." That is, when you put on headphones and press Play on a music player, the results are spectacular-you get a very close equivalent to the concert-hall experience.

But watching video on a tiny three-inch hand-held screen is almost nothing like the experience of watching a movie in a theater or even on TV. It can’t approach the same realism or emotional impact.

Worth a read.

Cnet is reporting here that Hewlett Packard will be installing the Windows version of iTunes and reselling HP-branded iPods, made by Apple.

Could bring a lot of new users to iTMS.

Steve Jobs says ""Apple's goal is to get iPods and iTunes into the hands of every music lover around the world, and partnering with HP, an innovative consumer company, is going to help us do just that," Jobs said in a statement. "As the industry balkanizes by offering digital music wrapped in a multitude of incompatible proprietary technologies, consumers will be reassured in getting the same unparalleled digital music solutions from both HP and Apple, two leaders in the digital music era."

So I'm sitting here in this room at UC Berkeley, where there's about 60 people from major research universities across the country, all with their laptops, listening to various presentations. I'm sitting in the front row, and as I look back across the room I am struck by the fact that over half of the laptop lids facing me feature that prominent gently glowing Apple logo.

That's a big change over the last year or so for this audience. These folks are all hard core central computing types - technology architects and CIOs or high level directors. What does it mean? Probably that OS X has become the Unix for the rest of us. Or maybe it's iTunes :)

One of the great things about working at the University of Washington is that I get to work with a whole lot of smart people who are doing interesting things. And a good chunk of them work in my part of the organization.

I try to do year-end messages to the folks I work closely with where I take a look back on the events of the year, to give at least a little perspective and look at trends, etc.

Here's the email I sent this year with the link to the year-end thoughts.

------------------------------------------
Folks -

I had hoped to get this out before the end of the year, but the best
intentions... :)

I want to thank all of you for all of the work you've done over the last
year, and to take the opportunity to reiterate what a pleasure and a
privelege I find it to work with all of you. We are continuing to
accomplish astounding feats on a daily basis in spite of an increasingly
challenging and demanding environment. I am honored to work with such a
talented group of people, and I find it a continual pleasure to come to
work and be surprised by the amazing things that are going on around me.

In the heat of trying to support the daily activities we're engaged in, it
sometimes becomes difficult to keep track of all that we've accomplished
over time, so I think it's worth taking the opportunity of the beginning
of a new year to reflect on some of what's been taking place in our
environment.

In trying to document some of my thoughts on what has happened in the past
year, it became a little longer than an email perhaps warrants, so I put
some year-end thoughts on the web at
http://staff.washington.edu/oren/2003-year-end.html
Thanks, and I look forward to another stimulating year with all of you!

- Oren
-------------------------------------------------------

Mitchell Baker, President of the Mozilla Foundation and manager of community and partner relations for OSAF, gave a wonderful talk on establishing and managing open source projects. My notes on it are here.

Mitchell gave some great background on the different ways open source projects can be structured, and how to foster and use communities in open source projects.

In addition, at the end she talked a little bit about the Mozilla Foundation, and how the real focus of the Foundation now is to look at what developments really need to happen to enhance the user experience of the Web, and advancing that state of the art. I'll post the link to her slides when I get it.

Sheila Ochner from the University of Texas at Austin gave a detailed talk this morning about how they've integrated Extreme Programming practices into their distributed software development methods for their administrative applications. My notes on it are here.

Being the survivor of too many large and endless software development projects, I'm particularly drawn to the idea of doing small, incremental projects collaboratively with low risk values being assigned to each increment.

Sandy Senti from Stanford gave an interesting talk this morning on their efforts at hiring offshore help for software development in the administrative applications area for the university. My detailed notes on it are here.

I thought it was particularly interesting to hear that their developing vision is to outsource and send offshore their administrative app development in order to use their in-house staff to concentrate on academic and research software development.

She also said that they considered sending their help-desk offshore, but ended up deciding not to because the offshore staff didn't have enough of the important knowledge specific to the institution.

Had a great day today hanging out with my old friends Andy Kivel and Jim Goldberg. Andy and I took in the Macworld exhibit hall this morning. One thing I saw that looked cool is the Squeezebox, a digital wireless media hub that can play music from iTunes libraries on a home stereo over 802.11b. Unfortunately it doesn't work with files purchased from the iTunes music store, due to Apple's DRM technology - sigh.

Apple introduced the Mini-iPod today. Very cool form factor, but at $250 for 4 GB (compared to $300 for 15 GB on the regular iPod) it hardly seems worth the price. I think it would've been really groovy at the $100 price point that was rumored last week.

Apple also introduced music software called Garage Band, that looks like a lot of fun - sort of like the Acid software that's available for Windows, but maybe even better. I foresee myself spending endless hours playing with this one.

I purchased a new laptop backpack from Crumpler. Terrifically designed and constructed bags from these folks. But unfortunately, the sales droid at the booth told me that the Sheep Scarer would fit a 15" PowerBook, but when I got back to the hotel tonight, it doesn't. Sigh - will have to go back to the show to exchange it for the larger Base Toucher.

Then we went across the street to SFMOMA to see the Diane Arbus exhibit. This is a *major* retrospective of Arbus' work, and was an incredible experience - lots of photographs that she never printed herself, plus lots of her writings that were never published before. I was somewhat surprised to find out how articulate she was about her artistic aims, especially around documenting all sorts of ritual behavior throughout our society. I also was impressed by the respect she accorded her subjects, no matter how out-on-the-edges they might seem to us today, to say nothing of how far out they seemed fifty years ago when she took the photos. Well worth checking out.

Happy New Year to all! May 2004 be better than 2003 all around!

I'm off to Berkeley for the week for the winter Common Solution Group meeting, along with the first meeting of the advisory board for the Westwood version of the Chandler project from Open Source Applications Foundation, and some discussion with OSAF folks about the evolution of calendaring standards. Should be fun and interesting.

I'll be doing some blogging of these events as they unfold starting Wednesday. Tomorrow, however, I plan to hook up with some old friends from college and catch up!