Information Technology Committee Sept and October Meetings

The Information Technology Committee (ITC) has met twice so far this academic year. The ITC advises the Vice Provost for Information Technology, who is also the Campus Chief Information Officer (CIO) and executive director of DoIT. The ITC also advises and has a role in approving policies for IT in the broader university community – 70% of IT on this campus is not done by DoIT! The ITC has three student members, currently one undergraduate and two graduate students. It’s worth noting that the ITC is not an entirely technical committee. While certainly the ITC does have technically capable members, most of the technical decisions are left to campus professional staff. The ITC does not dictate that we buy Cisco routers instead of Juniper routers, for example, but focuses more in saying that we need a high speed network available everyone on campus and this is the way we’ll fund it. However, we can and sometimes do ask pointed questions about why one particular technology was chosen, or provide guidance in how to evaluate purchasing options.

The first ITC meeting was in September, and focused largely on just orientating new members to the committee. As part of the process, each member was asked to give a list of “pet projects” they’d like to see the committee or campus take up. The full list is in our minutes, which are online here: http://itc.wisc.edu/minutes/minutes.asp?min_id=522

One thing I am very interested in pushing this year is lecture capture, i.e. recording audio and video of lectures and posting it online. I think it is a terrible waste that so few lectures are recorded on this campus – to use a bad analogy, they’re like an inefficient power plant, and capturing these lectures could produce a lot more value for students, faculty, and the public. I think an ambitious but attainable goal would have 100% of lectures captured in five years.

In a related issue from the first meeting, a member of the committee mentioned “clickers”, which are the devices that a professor can use to have students vote or answer questions during lectures. Clickers are unpopular with students, right? Please let me know if I’m way off base here.

Another issue that we’ve spent a lot of time discussing on the ITC is Moodle, which is a software package that does the same thing as the software behind Learn@UW. If you’re in the business school or college of engineering, you’ve probably used Moodle. I will write more about Moodle in the future, but campus and the ITC is paying careful attention to Moodle as a potential replacement for the current Learn@UW. It’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, and certainly not until next fall, which would only happen in the very worst-case scenario.

The ITC website is http://itc.wisc.edu/, and our meetings are the 3rd Friday of every month at 10am. We have many visitors who attend the meetings, and any interested student should absolutely attend – the chair is very good about allowing guests to participate in the discussion!

University Academic Planning Council October 08 Meeting

The first meeting of the University Academic Planning Council (UAPC) was on Thursday October 16th. The UAPC is one of the last bodies that reviews academic programs and long-range plans before final approval by the Provost, Chancellor, and Faculty Senate. The UAPC is chaired by the Provost, and has as voting members the Dean of the Graduate School, an administrator chosen by the Provost (current the Dean of L&S), a representative from the University Committee (the executive committee of the Faculty Senate), 5 more faculty members, a representative from the Academic Staff Executive Committee, and a non-voting student representative. The Chancellor is officially a member, but by tradition does not attend the meetings.

In a nutshell, if you don’t want to read all what we do in Faculty Policy and Procedures (FP&P), we approve the creation, modification, and elimination of certificates, majors, centers, and departments, as well as reviewing campus wide academic issues.

As this was our first meeting, we spent some time reviewing the charge of the committee and our processes. Five minutes into the meeting, when we were just reviewing the roster of the committee, a member wondered aloud why the student member was non-voting, and quickly we decided to add to the agenda for our next meeting a recommendation to the University Committee to consider changing FP&P to give voting rights to the student member. I don’t know how long this process will take (our next meeting to even make the recommendation isn’t until the end of December), so I am not expecting to have an official vote this year. However, there’s a good chance that future student members will have voting membership on the council.

When we actually got down to business, our main item was reviewing the annual report of the University General Education committee. The Gen Ed committee oversees things like the CommA/CommB and Qualitative Reasoning A and B requirements, along with the UAPC. This past year the Gen Ed committee studied in-depth the Comm A courses and what sort of effects they had on students. In summary, students who take Comm A courses benefit from the experience, no matter which of the five different Comm A courses they take.

We also approved a new certificate program in the Engineering Physics department in “Engineering Risk, Uncertainty, and Decision Analysis”. This is for undergraduates, and packages together existing courses in Engineering and Statistics, as well as a new Engineering course, to produce a 15-credit program.

Our website is at http://apa.wisc.edu/acad_plng.html - the annual report from the 07-08 academic year is a fast read and gives a good feel for what we do.

Campus Planning Committe, Meeting of September 25, 2008

At the inaugural meeting of the Campus Planning Committee, we accomplished three items:

• MINUTES: We approved the minutes of the May 15, 2008 meeting.

• TOUR 1: The committee was led on a tour of the New Granger Hall extension. Highlights of the tour included various classroom configurations, an electronic room reservation system and the interactive capabilities for distance learning. The building was envisioned as a five-story structure, but due to cost overruns, it was limited to four-stories. All floor are accessible to students.

• TOUR 2: The committee was led on a tour of the University Square Complex. Highlights of the tour include the green roof, the new WSUM radio facility/lounge, the two-level UHS offices and treatment rooms, the new ASM offices and the student organization carrels.

After University Square, the meeting was adjourned. The next meeting will be on 10/25/08.

Union Council

Union Council had their first meeting of Fall Semester '08.

We did quite an extensive overview of the Union (as our bylaws state we have to), and its processes. Updates were brief, as it was the first meeting, but several important points were brought up.

First, the opening of the new cafe in Granger has been welcomed with a warm opening, and the Union had a good summer as far as the budget is concerned. We did vote to disband the Union's partnership with GUTS. There had been a situation 20 years ago in which GUTS worked with the Union quite closely, since then however, they have had an increasingly small roll. After Union South is torn down, they will no longer reside in the Union.

New designs for Union South will be forthcoming soon! Updated I suppose is a better word. 

Thanks,

Guthrie

Shared Gov Summer Mailing

Dear Shared Governance Committee Members,

Congratulations on getting through another year… I hope everyone is taking some time off and enjoying their summer. I just wanted to touch base with everyone and send a few Shared Gov reminders.

First, congratulations to everyone who was appointed to serve on a committee for the 2008-2009 academic year! Your appointments came out of an intense interview process – be proud, there were a lot of qualified candidates, and you were standouts. Remember that several responsibilities come along with your appointment. In addition to regularly attending your committee meetings, you are also required to attend the weekly Shared Governance meetings. The weekly Shared Governance meetings are an opportunity for all Shared Governance appointees to come together, share information, and provide feedback.

Also, thanks to all 2007-2008 appointees. Your outstanding work gave this committee a huge boost of legitimacy that will be valuable next year and in years to come. It was a privilege to get to know all of you. Please remember that your appointment runs until the end of summer; if your committee meets before classes begin, try your best to attend. Update on this blog as usual. If you cannot post on the blog for some reason, email me an update. If summer opportunities such as search and screens come up, I will send out an email and post here soliciting appointees. We still have spots open for the fall, so be on the lookout for committee opportunities.

We will be having a meeting before summer ends, probably during the week of August 20-27; I'll send an update with the exact date and place. The first regular fall meeting will be September 2nd. Our meeting time for the year will be, as it was last year, Tuesdays at 5:00 pm. I realize that the 2nd is the first day of classes, but we will have a lot to do to get ready for the year. I’ll send out a reminder email and agenda the week before. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please email me.

Thanks!

Adam Sheka
Chair, Shared Governance Committee
sheka@wisc.edu

Recent WiscMail Outage

The CIO/Vice Provost for Information Technology sent a detailed message to the Information Technology Committee about Wednesday's WiscMail outage. We will, I'm sure, be getting another update at our next ITC meeting.

Just to quick translate a few things in the message. First, a "memory leak" basically means that the longer the program runs, the slower it becomes. They are bugs and are occasionally encountered in new versions of software, and in general the right thing to do is to go back to the old version. Second, to understand "rebuild the message storage index database", just focus on "rebuild index." If you rip the index out of the back of a book, to replace it you have to start at the beginning of the book and re-read the whole thing. Without the index, the mail server can't find someone's email messages without searching through all of the messages. You can imagine that building an index for 60,000 inboxes takes a little bit of time.

All

Now that WiscMail service is restored, I want to give you an update on what happened.

First, let me apologize for the inconveniences this caused you. I am certain that we all count on e-mail for much of what we do every day and having these services unavailable is a significant disruption for us.

Tuesday morning, the WiscMail team installed an update to the Sun software we use to process mail. It was believed to be a fairly modest upgrade. By noon Tuesday, a few of our mail servers were experiencing a "memory leak," which degraded from poor to no performance rather quickly. The mail team worked with the vendor to address the problems and decided to roll back the upgrade to the previous version of software. The team worked around the clock to restore service for our
users. Wednesday morning we experienced performance problems that resulted from the rollback, which required the mail team to rebuild the message store index databases. Full IMAP, POP, and webmail email delivery services were restored early afternoon Wednesday.

It is extremely rare that our WiscMail service experiences an outage. I want to assure you that steps are being taken to make sure every future upgrade does not bring this effect. The mail team is working with Sun Microsystems to fully diagnose the error(s), fix the upgrade and reapply it when we have full assurance it will work under current loads. We will also hold a post-incident review to learn from this event and adjust our strategies as appropriate.

Thank you for your patience and trust.


--
Ron Kraemer
Vice Provost for Information Technology
Chief Information Officer (CIO)
University of Wisconsin-Madison
ron.kraemer@cio.wisc.edu

I'm sure that this will bring up some discussions about the future of WiscMail as well. Here are some things to think about.

• First, WiscMail is not designed to have "no downtime." To truly take it to the next level, we would need to have multiple active data centers. At present, there is an emergency plan, and all data continuously stored at multiple locations. If something catastrophic were to happen to the Computer Sciences building, not a single email would be lost. However, if the Computer Sciences building can't recover, it would take a few days to totally restore email service from the backup site. It would be VERY expensive to both fully equip the additional data centers and more importantly, modify our email system (and the additional software that is necessary to run the email system) to automatically fail over and have just a few minutes at most of downtime. I don't know if there's something to be found in the middle of these two extremes, where we could restore email within say a few hours of a catastrophe at Computer Sciences. Clearly, there was no catastrophe at Computer Sciences Wednesday, so there is a lot of work to do with the current system so it can recover quickly even with one active data center.
• Second, switching to GMail or some other outsourced email provider is not a "no-brainer" in terms of cost. GMail would reduce some costs, and will increase others. We don't know entirely know how those balance out. In addition, there are a whole host of new legal issues related to data ownership, privacy, and state records requirements that would need to be identified as part of any move. GMail does have multiple data centers, but they too have had the occasional multi-hour outage and are much less forthcoming about those outages.

The big questions will be How much does Email cost?, and How much is Email worth to us? I don't know how much of this we'll get to discuss at the last ITC meeting of the year, but these issues will certainly be on people's minds, and hopefully we'll be able to have a good discussion on May 16th.

Final Post

Dear SGers,

This is my final post as chair of ASM Shared Governance. First, thank you to everyone who attended the transition mixer we had on Tuesday night. It was nice to see old and new faces alike, and I'm very excited to know we have an outstanding crop of new appointees for next year.

As we've been discussing throughout this year, Shared Governance is in transition, and this work will continue into the fall. With new bylaws and a moved appointment process, we have paved the way for a more functional and efficient system. The great work of Travis Weller (Shared Governance Appointment Coordinator), whose position was created only 1.5 yrs ago, has allowed us to be more robust in our representation - Shared Governance is providing more active and effective input on key university committees than ever before, expanding is reach in helping to create new committees, and is streamlining its internal operations.

Starting this fall, the committee will hold for the first time a comprehensive orientation for all new appointees - complete with parliamentary procedure trainings and discussions with other shared governance stakeholders (i.e., faculty, staff, and administration). Also, I hope the next chair will utilize the shared governance board, especially those positions that aim to: a) foster the expansion of student representation, where and when appropriate; and b) educate the student body on what shared governance is and how it affects them as members of the university community.

Shared governance has a rich history at the University of Wisconsin, making this institution one of the most robust when it comes to student representation. Indeed, no other student government in the country partakes in the governance process of its university to the extent that we do. Please keep this in mind when serving next year, and know that students entrust you with a high degree of responsibility to serve in the interests of students to the best of your ability. Good luck, and I'll see you in the fall.

Warm Regards,

Jeff Wright