Present: Mark Aldenderfer, Arlene Allen, Eric Brody, Polly Bustillos, Larry Carver, Glenn Davis, Saturnino Doctor, Bill Koseluk, Tom Marazita, Mark McGilvray, Elise Meyer, Alan Moses, Linda Moskovits Joan Murdoch, Stan Nicholson, Dan Ringwald, Glenn Schiferl, Deborah Scott, Jan Smith, Heidi Straub, Craig Welsh, Paul Weakliem
AuthDir
The Authorization Software RFQ has been completed and went out for bids Friday, February 21. Responses are due in four weeks (approx March 21). Members for a team of evaluators will be solicited in the next few weeks. Evaluation of submissions should take approximately three weeks.
Techno Trash
Bill Koseluk mentioned an article that he had read in the Chronicle of Higher Education concerning the pollution, specifically in China, generated by the disposal of computer equipment. Currently Central Stores manages such waste, but should this service be discontinued, the campus should be concerned about disposal.
Wireless
A BEG meeting is being scheduled to discuss the Wireless paper put together by Kevin Schmidt and presented at the last ITPG meeting.
IT Strategies
Mark Aldenderfer reported that UCSB is facing $12M in permanent budget cuts, but there is no specific timeline for these cuts at present. A committee comprised of faculty and staff is being formed to consider how to deal with this situation. Information Technology is a priority of the chancellor.
Concern was expressed regarding the impact of the budget cuts on building wiring projects. In addition to the IBW projects, there are numerous building renovation or seismic projects that have an impact on building wiring. Many of these projects have inadequate or nonexistent funding for doing the necessary wiring. Deborah Scott is the Staff Alternate representative to the Campus Planning Committee. That might provide another way to make sure that building wiring needs are addressed in the budget at the beginning of the project. David Chapman of Communication Services is tracking the design progress of 32 major building projects. The OIT has gotten involved in the case of the Noble Hall renovation, where inadequate funding was provided for wiring. Student Affairs and the OIT worked together to make sure that the Embarcadero Hall building project included interior wiring after it was originally left out of the scope of the project. The backbone connection for Embarcadero Hall was provided as an IBW project.
MIT Open Courseware Initiative
Stan Nicholson reported on the videoconference on MIT’s Open Courseware Initiative. This initiative is to put 2000 courses online and make them freely available to anyone. Currently 200 courses are done. This initiative is extremely expensive and MIT never got 100% faculty participation. This project is separate from and built on top of MIT’s interactive system developed for their own students. One of the questions at the videoconference was whether UC should do something like this too. Fred Beshears (UCB) is interested in doing an Open Courseware “Lite." More information is available in Stan’s email to the ITPG mailing list of Friday, February 21, 2003, and for a short period of time online.
GSA Election
Eric Brody announced that the Graduate Division would be conducting an online election for the Graduate Student Association in the beginning of April. They will be using LDAP for authentication, and they want to waylay any problems that we might be able to foresee. It was noted that Student Affairs did an online election last fall and they kept the polling open for 3 days to make sure that students had ample time to get access.
Network Funding
There was a question about the status of the Network Funding Model project. Elise Meyer has been spending the last couple of months doing a historical analysis of campus-wide networking costs, with the goal of presenting a request for funding for the next fiscal year. This work could then be converted into the basis for a new network funding model.
Peer-to-Peer Protocol Policy
Given that several departments are developing their own policies regarding the use of P2P protocols, is there a plan to develop a campus-wide policy on this issue. The group consensus was that there already did exist policy that could apply to this issue, in the areas of incidental use of campus resources, and copyrights.
Following are two general sections in the Electronic Communications Policy (pdf) that apply to the use of peer-to-peer protocols.
- GENERAL PROVISIONS
- Violations of Law and Policy (page 4)
- University Disciplinary Actions. University policy prohibits the use of University property for illegal purposes and for purposes not in support of the mission of the University. In addition to any possible legal sanctions, violators of this Policy may be subject to disciplinary action up to and including dismissal or expulsion, as relevant, pursuant to University policies and collective bargaining agreements. Further information on permitted and prohibited uses is given in Section III, Allowable Use.
- ALLOWABLE USE
- Allowable Uses (page 10)
- Personal Use. University users of a University electronic communications facility or service may use that facility or service for incidental personal purposes provided that, in addition to the foregoing constraints and conditions, such use does not: (i) directly or indirectly interfere with the University's operation of electronic communications resources; (ii) interfere with the user?s employment or other obligations to the University, or (iii) burden the University with noticeable incremental costs. When noticeable incremental costs for personal use are incurred, users shall follow campus guidelines and procedures for reimbursement to the University.
New Topics
One of the charges to the ITPG was to look ahead to see if there are any new technology issues that need to be addressed. Glenn Davis reminded us that it has been 18 months since we last asked that question and so it was time to think ahead again.
Payments by Credit Cards: This is an area of interest to Housing, Graduate Division, Student Affairs, and BARC. Each of these groups is looking to solve their problem on their own and several are looking at CyberSource. Trenna Hunter is leading a centralized effort. Some of the problems encountered by her group dealt with the credit card 1.75-2% service charge. There are rules that mandate that all charges must be the same whether the payee is using a credit card or cash to make payment. If you charge a convenience fee you can only charge a flat rate, not a percentage. The difficulty is to come up with a convenience fee that will adequately cover the cost of the service charges, but not discourage the use of credit cards. Campuses that have not tried to recover the service charge are suffering losses of $2M-4M. It is possible today to accept web payments via electronic transfers from individual’s bank accounts.
Wireless: Continues to be of interest to the group.
Courseware: Continues to be of interest to the group.
The status of the OIT’s Academic Technology Working Group is that Mark will be making a presentation on the project to the Senior officers on 2/25/03, in an effort to get senior officer buy-in.
Courseware infrastructure needs should be considered.
Instructional Computing, Instructional Consultation, and L&S Information Technology are co-sponsoring a "Summer Institute: Teaching with Technology" for three days in June. There will be both beginning and advanced content. There will be presentations by faculty on why you want to use this technology. Currently 28 people have signed up and they can take a maximum of 60. This is an attempt to re-package existing training resources into a more cohesive effort.
Instructional Computing, Instructional Consultation, and L&S Information Technology are also co-sponsoring web mini-grants. This program provides up to 80 hours of trained undergraduate student time to help put materials up on the web. It is available to 10 faculty per quarter. This program also is turning out to be a good mentorship program between faculty and students.
Increased Regulatory Environment: An example is SB1386, which addresses notifications regarding compromised databases (see last month’s minutes). UCOP is developing draft implementation guidelines. UCSB has questions about the current draft, such as, what does “account number” mean? One task that will need to be done is to maintain an inventory of vulnerable databases. The latest draft will be distributed to the ITPG mailing list?
Remaining Priorities from Our Last Process: We were reminded that there were still many unfunded priorities from the last time we did this process.
Student Open Access: It was reported that the NetStations located in various locations on campus have become obsolete and have been removed. IC may end up closing their open access labs and replacing them with instructional labs. The library has some open access computers available and is looking at allowing students to bring in their own laptops and plugging them into a special LAN segment. No complaints have been registered regarding any inability to gain access. Kerr Hall has an open access facility that has 25-50% usage, but that is high considering that their systems only allow web browsing. One of the first efforts by the ITPG was to survey the status of student access. It was noted at the time that many of the desktops used by students were not part of a cyclical replacement program. So with the continued lack of funding, what we identified in that report as “lifeline access” is now going away or being reduced.
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