Email culture kills interaction between campus colleagues

There is an interesting in the THES today which states that, "Email culture kills interaction between campus colleagues".

Do you agree?

The article starts:- "V-cs in 'state of denial' about quality of internal communications, survey reveals. John Gill reports

An overbearing "email culture" and a shortage of staffrooms and areas where people can meet and chat are being blamed for hindering internal communications in universities.

In addition, communications directors consider academic managers to be much weaker at communicating with staff than their counterparts in purely administrative roles.

The initial findings of a sector-wide research project led by the University of Leicester also suggest that the views of vice-chancellors on internal communications strategies are often far removed from those of the people employed to oversee those strategies".

CISCO08 Public Services Summit

Have attended the CISCO Public Services Summit in Stockholm and Oslo - see http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le21/le34/nobel/2008/index.html.

CISCO has given it a real Web 2.0 feel by encouraging delegates to blog, twitter and flickr with the results of this activity captured on http://www.cisco08.com/. It will be interesting to see how delegates respond to this initiative. The flickr entries are at: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/cisco08.

A thought provoking and challenging conference.

First Day:-

Paul Johnston - Exploring technology enabled change. Themes are: sustainability, innovation and inclusion.

Ulla Hamilton (Vice Mayor of Stockholm): 98% broadband penetration in city. Stockholm has infrastructure to enable traffic congestion to be reviewed on the web.

Simon Willis (VP Public Sector, CISCO): Recommendation - look at NASA's web sites looking at early civiliations up to 5000 years ago. All have complex distributed networks - connect, trade, specialise, using the commons of the river delta.

We face the most extraordinary challege with the climate - and we stand ready to make the wrong decsions. The credit crisis has made it even more difficult.

Carlata Perez (Unversity of Cambridge): looked at the roles of markets and states in shaping a sustainable age. Five technological revolutions in 240 years: industrial revolution; age of steam, coal and iron; age of steel and heavy engineering; age of automobile; age of ICT - half way through; and to come -> age of biotech. Each takes 40-60 years to spread, reach maturity and produce conditions for the next revolution.

In 1990s we had cheap oil and cheap Asian labour which favoured the old marketing and consumption patterns. Still struggling to move on from this. The shift to "ICT green" is possible; gradual redesign of patterns of good-life needed. Much institutional innovation is now needed for feasible sustainable global growth.The innovative power of ICT must be harnessed to facilitate this. The paradyne is not to make everyone the same, every region will bring out its identity - but have common ambitions in environmental friendliness and sustainability.

CISCO's connected sustainability book addresses many of the issues.

Government 2.0: New Directions for the Public Sector:- Interactive Panel consisting of: William Perrin (UK Government), Peter Shergold (former permanent sec. of Australian dept. of the PM), Christian Sautter (former French finance minister) and Christian Rupp (executive sec. e-Government in Austria).
What should Government 2.0 look like?

• Web 2 is a fundamental democratisation - makes it easy to publish:
• makes it possible to engage democratic process - e-Petition (1.7m in one petition in UK);
• new types of public services and public information - netmums web site - not under governmental control;
• ultra-local communities - able to empower communities but might unsettle.

• Important for social inclusion, quality of life - but - have to fight digital divide:
  
• improve technology - everybody has access - fibre optic into poor housing - sponsored;
  
• all primary schools have access - include e-Learning in home;
• senior people - special programmes for these people.

• Gives chance to be local and act globally if we want.
  

The UK has started a wiki to find the best way to use public information: www.showusabetterway.com It has a very large take-up.

Tom Steinberg brought in to UK activities to give: power of innovation, and that, "the Government should work in partnership with the best of citizens' efforts, not replicate them".
Would be like advice to choose best schools, hospitals on same basis as we take decisions on best electronic products.

Interesting student room web page for students wishing to find the best University and resources.

Fixmystreet has moved knowledge of what needs to be done from the local authority to the public.

Strategies for National Broadband Policy (afternoon day 1)

In the past: labour/resources/capital were the production factors. 'Connected knowledge' has been added. Scarcity was the common denominator of the three classical factors.

Recorded outputs of every human language: 6exabytes. In 2006 it was 15 exabytes digitally.

Richard Allan -
Broadband accelerates social and economic growth.
Need to have quality of ICT ecosystem (policy and regulations.) and extent of ICT infrastructure . Being advanced has been shown to give higher productivity..
Barack Obama, 6 December 2008, US ranked 15th in world in broadband adoption -renew information superhighway.

Key questions for a New Strategy

• Policies and regulations: need to be based on IP convergence (have they shifted from telephony)
• Market structure: need competitive markets, and sustainable
• Bottlenecks: is balance of private and public investment right? Are incentives and the public/private balance of investment adequate?
• e-Government strategy
• Does lack of ICT user skills constrain use of the Internet?
• Applications and tent - is the business environment conducive to take up

Sweden casestudy - Maria Hall Large public investment, 500mEuro. Project: electronic services - whenever and wherever.
Accessibility, robustness, more secure, IT-standardisation, electronic identification, openness in the networks


Lebanon casestudy - Kamal Shehadi
Need:

• to start from almost scratch
• separate broadband and mobile licenses;
  
• to incorporate existing service providers (who have reserved bandwidths of the spectrum), this is a serious problem;
• any new developer to meet new requirements for providing connectivity across the building - reduce costs of broadband
• to bring the country back to the internal telecommunications scene through market liberalization.
  

An interesting recurring theme is Paul Baran's vision of a network of networks. This led to the architecture used by the Internet/web. But is a network of networks resilient to rapid growth?

The world Internet project is an interesting review of the use of the Internet across 2 countries (UCLA).

Second Day

Richard Allan (CISCO) led session with William Perrin (UK Cabinet Office) and Hannah Brogren (City of Stockholm) to discuss Power of Information.

The UK's drive is to allow citizens to specify the need and to drive the response through mash-ups. By contrast, in Stockholm the drive is from the authorities, guided by citizen needs established through blogs, polls, and interviews.

An interesting development in Stockholm is that each page has RSS feeds.

Top 5 e-Government counties are those who have started from scratch - Slovenia, Latvia etc (can start a company within a day).

Wordpress makes it possible to set up blogs easily.

Richard Allan - what needs to be done? Theyworkforyou scrapes information from various sources to provide information on MPs (run by charity - some public service money).

BBC spends £120m on websites, central Government spends £250m on their websites. The BBC websites are generally considered to be better - and they took a strategic decision to reduce their number.

Obama is very keen on making data reusable.

planningalerts.com enables you to find planning requests close to where you live.

Day two afternoon session

Jorge Sampaio - former Portugese President

Compared digital revolution with Portugese revolution in the 1970s. Better informed public improves democracy. Emerging collective intelligence. Recent presidential campaign in US used Internet heavily for the first time.

Narendra Jadhav - Ho. VC of Pune University, India

University has 650,000 students with 480 courses - all on web site.

Charles Leadbetter - UK based think-tank; author of 'we-think'

We-think a 4 minute video on Youtube -worth a look.

Web could go in many different directions. Jonathan Zittrain's views.

Funtwo - 53million hits for guitar solo. Amazing story of the Internet. Boy not having to respect authority, not have to use traditioanl means, just get on and do it yourself.

Design principle for new world is 'think with'. We have been brought up with the world doing things for you or to you. :ogic of Internet, wikipedia is working with people.Environmentally, logic of working woth people. Needs new kinds of leadership.

Professor Lawrence Lessig 'Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace'

Readonly culture- iTunes
Read-write - Wikipedia
-> Now remix - taking images and sounds and remixing
-> Sharing -> YELP.

So:

• Commercial
• Hybrid
• Sharing
  

Microsoft - Community Technologies - even uses Hybrid

Hybrids comes in different types. Is there a 'just hybrid'?

Change.gov - Abama's web site gives people a sense of ownership - as citizens produce value for the Government.

Democracy must be a priority. Is democracy threatened by increased scepticism? Gore: Crisis of democracy.

Guido Jouret - VP Emerging Technologies Group, CISCO

The Art and Science of Innovation.

Innovation as a Process

• Changing world: Consumerization, technology flattening the world, social networking, green consciousness
  
• Innovation comes from interface with customer.
  

The Power of Disruption

• Private company in 2001, Eli Lilly - Innocentive
• Large companies struggle with innovation
• The Innovator's Dialemma 2000
• Cloud computing is disruptive from virtualisation and from pay-for-use
• IP traffic will increase 6X from 2007 to 2012 - video and IP TV
• Video now is like the web in the 90s -> mashing video with business case. Video puts the human element back into the equation. Moving to medianet
• I-prize www.cisco.com/iprize
• Simple big ideas@CISCO - telepresence
• Recipe for innovation
  
• - think big; bold vision
• - try something new
• - solve simple points well
• - 5 phase plan
• - start, lead and others will follow
• - communicate, often and simply
• - do it with passion
  

Future success requires continuing focus on innovation.

Encyclopaedia Idiotica

The THES has an article this week which starts, "Wikipedia is created mostly by teenage male computer nerds, so Martin Cohen worries about its growing clout among 'scholars'

What is it about Wikipedia? It didn't exist in 2001. Not so long ago, it was just an obscure website full of biographies of sports figures and esoteric details about TV shows such as Star Trek.

But now it is big business. Wikipedia has unexpectedly become the most dominant "scholarly" source on the web. Now its aim is no less than "to become a complete record of human knowledge".

See: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=403327

... and there are interesting comments.

2008 IBM Academic Days Conference

Today it is the IBM Academic Days Conference...

Ian Abbott-Donnelly, European CTO, spoke on 'Big Green Innovations'

'Big Green Innovations' refers to IBM innovations. There is a separate IBM initiative to make datacentres more efficient (not really covered in the presentation).

Similar statistics were shown as at the Gartner briefing yesterday.

IBM advertised all the environmentally friendly activities they were engaged in...

IBM claims a retro fit to a datacentre will give 30-40% improvement. Re-building from scratch would give an 80% improvement in energy efficiency.

http://www.top500.org is said to have electricity costs for different supercomputers (but I cannot find it).

A comment was made re. reducing electrical consumption. This is likely to be necessary, not just to reduce carbon, but because the infrastructure will not be able to supply enough.

Gartner Higher Education Briefing: e-Learning, Green IT

An interesting meeting in Barcelona with two main topics.

The Future of e-Learning in Higher Education:

By 2001, many institutes had created established course management systems (as opposed to their teachers using a variety of management systems).

The question asked was: are we starting to see the end of the institute course management systems? Are many of the functions in the CMS being replaced with Web 2.0 services; which are supplied externally to the institute (wikis, social networks,...)?

It was agreed that the answer would be to use SOAs with well defined standards, so that it would be possible to integrate added services to a CMS framework. Cardiff is using this approach with Sakai as the underlying framework.

Many people are concerned that Blackboard acquired WebCT (and the forced migration of users of the latter) - and universities are now actively looking for Open Source alternatives (Moodle is the favourite, then Sakai).



Green IT

It is estimated that IT 's carbon contribution is 2% of the total (roughly the same scale as aviation).

But within higher education, for universities which do not run large pieces of scientific equipment, the IT share is estimated to be between 15 and 20% total.

{http://www.ghg.protocol.org enables you to do your own calculations.}

The consequence is that changes to IT can offer significant carbon savings within a university as a fraction of the whole.

The effects of ICT on environmental sustainability:

• Negative: Greenhouse gas emission in manufacture. waste, hazardous substances, use of scarce resources
• Positive: Travel substitution, transport optimisation, e-Business and e-Government, environmental controls systems

ICT's Global Emissions:-

• Printing (6%): mainly paper and not the energy to print
  
• LAN and Office Telecoms (7%): difficult to tackle
• Mobile Telecoms (9%)
• Fixed-Line Telecoms (15%)
• Servers including cooling - data centre (24%)
• PCs, etc (39%): focus should be here

The embodied energy for a PC (building and delivery) is estimated to be 70-80% of the total energy used by the PC (but this ratio is questioned by the manufacturers).

It is recommended to undertake an environmental assessment, and set targets for power consumption and carbon levels.

It is estimated that 2,500 PCs and laptops cost 64kEuros in electricity over a year. it is relatively easy to halve this.

Data Centres are intending to cut power by:

• virtualizing
• stopping over-provisioning
• using power management to throttle power based on use
• using a low power state or shutting servers down when not in use
• smart energy management (directing cooling)

http://www.epeat.net/ is a good site to help purchasers evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes.

Towards Low Carbon ICT conference

The Low Carbon ICT conference, held in Oxford University, and organised by Howard Noble and his team, was most interesting. Details are at:-
http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/lowcarbonict/conferences/conf-1.htm.

There were presentations on:-

• Low carbon ICT in context of Oxford University
• Low carbon approach in large hospital using virtualised servers
• A wonderful overview of reducing carbon in data centres
• Greening the full lifecycle (from manufacture through to recycling)
• Facebook meets green business
• Green technologies in the pipeline

I was very taken by the talk which addressed the power loss chain as applied to data centres. Liam Newcombe, of the BCS Data Centre Specialist Group, is acknowledged and thanked for the following slide:-


Just 0.5% of the energy of the fossil fuel is actually used to deliver power for computing.

When Liam's slides become available on the above web address, take a look and send your comments.

There is considerable scope for increasing the percentage if useful power used.

The Green Grid (http://www.thegreengrid.org/home) is a very interesting site. "The Green Grid is a global consortium dedicated to advancing energy efficiency in data centers and business computing ecosystems."

The conference agreed that the low carbon ICT area is going to grow and grow in importance.

Microsoft has offerd to buy Yahoo

"Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn (£22.4bn) in cash and shares...."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7222114.stm

This must be driven by the competition from Google.

USC gets Google Apps in ad-free environment

A colleague brought to my attention a deal where the University of Southern California has agreed a deal with Google for Google Apps for Education to be installed in an ad-free environment. See:- http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/14700.html.

"“Google Apps at USC is about more than e-mail,” Rhimes said. “The current generation of students study, network and socialize online. They want the freedom to work from multiple locations – including from different computers and mobile devices. Google Apps at USC offers them the flexibility that they want and need.

Because Google Apps at USC provides Web-based word processing, spreadsheet, calendar and chat programs, students can do their work anywhere they have Web access without worrying about downloading software or software compatibility. "

It is interesting to note that this is reserved just for students and not available to staff (how does it interoperate with the staff groupware provision?), and that it is ad-free.

Cambridge announces deployment of IT telephony

A press release yesterday (http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_010808.html) announced one of the largest IP telephony deployments in the education sector; a multi-million pound deal.

"The project will see BT, Cisco, and the University's IT Consultancy partner, PTS Consulting, deliver approximately 20,000 IP telephony handsets to the University over the next 18 months, replacing the existing system.

The University's investment will modernise the student experience, enabling students to collaborate in new and more innovative ways through the deployment of a converged voice, video and data network. Sharing information more easily will improve the quality of education and research, with students and academics using instant messaging, voice emails, streaming video and much more to share ideas in real time, from anywhere in the world."

This seems to be true convergence of communications and IT.