Present: Arlene Allen, Eric Brody, Glenn Davis, George Gregg, Bill
Koseluk, Kelly Lamar, Tom Lawton, Elise Meyer, Bruce Miller, Alan Moses,
Joan Murdoch, Stan Nicholson, Vince Sefcik, Glenn Schiferl, Jamie Sonsini,
John Vasi
Distribution of the agenda prior to the meeting was requested.
The Laboratory Operations Advisory Group (LOAG), chaired by Bill Koseluk,
plans to have their first meeting in December. Participation is needed
from COE, GSE and Bren. Their first task is to review the resource
list.
Auth/Dir reported that they have now merged new and changed data into
the UCSB Directory. It now includes phone numbers, titles, and departments
from the files provided by Communications Services. A new mailing
list has also been created with the purpose of providing information regarding
the technical progress of LDAP and announcements, e.g., major data merges.
The list will be called iscldap-l and it is intended for use by service
providers. Contact Arlene Allen at IS&C
if you want to join the list.
Auth/Dir also reported on the status of PKI. UCOP is still working
on the hardware and software configuration issues. The proposed rollout
is to bring up a Beta service with up to 100 certificates and to distribute
them to technically motivated, willing volunteers from ITPG or AuthDir.
Volunteers will have little to no help with this. Verisign is waiting
for UCOP to become a Certificate Authority and likewise for UCSB to become
a Subordinate Certificate Authority. If you want to be a volunteer,
verify that your data is correct in LDAP and send Arlene email. The
progress for this project will be driven by UCOP. There has been
an increase in LDAP registrations with people staking out addresses for
username@ucsb.edu. The self-registration process currently requires
having an email address in your directory entry, but there are lots of
blank email addresses for records so the process will soon change to only
requiring birthdates.
It was suggested that AuthDir start to look toward the Authentication
side of their mission, and that coordination and help was needed from the
Registrar. A desired target would be to develop an API that made
it easy for service providers to build authentication into their applications.
DECAF is also considering this issue.
It was noted that the NGB RFP work was completed and that UCSB Purchasing
would be placing the order any day.
The discussion then moved to our list of Instructional IT services and
its reception by the ITB at their November 13th meeting. Basically,
the ITB doesn’t see a broad campus-wide problem with the current instructional
use of IT. Some, however expressed the need for a "Tiger Team" that
could act as design consultants, or do a design review of a department’s
website. So the question was asked – Is there a problem to be solved,
or have we taken our message to the wrong group? People felt that
there was a need based on the future demand identified in the ITB survey,
the demand for workshops on web page development, and the pressure on support
groups like Instructional Consultation. It was thought that perhaps
we should also be talking to the Academic Senate committee on IT (CCITT)
or CEPAP, which deals with educational policy, or CITAS. UC Davis's
findings on instructional use of IT were also discussed.
Someone asked whether the target was "baseline" or "bleeding edge" support.
Could we define, for example, what resources would be required to provide
a basic web page for every UCSB course? Then, how many additional
staff members would it require to move up the hierarchy of sophistication?
Also, are we duplicating efforts to provide baseline support all over campus?
It was suggested that a subcommittee be formed to continue to work on
developing a document detailing what services and capabilities currently
exist, maybe divided into a tiered structure, and then consider taking
the document to other faculty groups in addition to ITB. Bill Koseluk,
Stan Nicholson, Kelly Lamar and Alan Moses volunteered for this group;
Paolo Gardinali was suggested as a possible contributor and we might request
representation from COE, GSE and Bren.
The Instructional Management System (IMS) project was mentioned as an
attempt to facilitate standards for interchange of course materials.
WebCT and Blackboard are participating. The URL for IMS is http://www.imsproject.org; the UC contact is Fred Beshears, (fmb@socrates.Berkeley.edu). There is also a group called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
It was requested that service providers bringing out new production
services include accurate disclosure to clarify what support is and is
not provided for the service. Proxy, LDAP and name@ucsb.edu were
listed as examples of services with support implications for client departments.
The Library reported that the next step for the Proxy Service was that
the Library would be contacting individual departments for the rest of
the quarter and that beginning Winter quarter a general announcement regarding
the service would be made. About twenty people are currently using
the service. This number should grow toward 100 as the rollout continues.
Over 500 ejournals are available. Hardcopy instructions are available
at the service desk.
It was noted that Software Depot would like to do some product
evaluations ahead of the renewal of our anti-virus software contract.
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