Minutes of the ITPG Meeting, February 24, 2003
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.
The Authorization Software RFQ has been completed and went out for bids Friday, February 21st. Responses are due in 4 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.
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.
A BEG meeting is
being scheduled to discuss the Wireless paper put together by Kevin Schmidt and
presented at the last ITPG meeting.
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
impact building wiring. Many of these
projects have inadequate or non-existent 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 when 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.
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 at http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~edtech/ocw/
GSA ELECTION
Eric Brody announced that the Graduate Division
would be conducting an on-line 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 on-line 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.
NB:
Here are two general sections in the Electronic Communications Policy ( http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/policies/ec/ecp.pdf ) that apply to the use of
peer-to-peer protocols:
II.
GENERAL PROVISIONS
E.
VIOLATIONS OF LAW AND POLICY (page 4)
2. 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.
III.
ALLOWABLE USE
D.
ALLOWABLE USES (page 10)
8.
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. (NB: 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.
Meeting adjourned at 10:00