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The UW computing community is extremely distributed, which can be a real advantage when it comes to timely and user-tailored solutions.  But it can also lead people to believe they work in isolation and need not be concerned with campus computing directives.  Since we are all tied together by shared networks, shared physical space and shared users, isolation doesn't work.  I recently made the following suggestion to some of the computing advisory groups:

 

Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 14:40:41 -0400 (EDT)

From: Erick Engelke <erick@engmail.uwaterloo.ca>

To: cnag@ist, csag@ist

Subject: A suggestion

 

I have a suggestion regarding system administration.

 

A quick scan through the DNS data, looking for ADMIN strings, returns 281 "admin" people, 99 in Engineering alone.

 

Though the exact numbers may be hard to determine accurately, it is probably safe to say that there are a lot of people administering computers on campus.

 

This creates a problem, because it is very hard to organize such distributed groups to follow common strategies, ... let alone even inform them of important decisions.

 

UCIST/CNAG/CSAG/WNAG assume that there is a general seepage of decisions and information that eventually get around to everyone who needs to know. After all, everyone is encouraged to read the "minutes" and figure out how decisions impact them personally.

 

We wouldn't expect every Canadian to read each bill and law in Parliament; in normal life we rely on someone to organize information into news we can use.

 

I would like to suggest a computing administration "news page" which gets updated periodically, but which gives clear information about important campus computing decisions that administrators absolutely must know.

 

It would benefit those who aren't at these meetings, it would inform new employees, and it would give us clear information we can use to influence our users.

 

I made a sample page at:

  http://www.uwaterloo.ca/~erick/engcomp/cnag/sample/sample-contents.htm

To be clear, my suggestion is not to replace the pages linked on the left, but to signal changes of great importance, particularly when the status quo is no longer acceptable.  I think the three examples on my page are representative.

 

It should not be about the latest worm, or other minor annoyances.  Nor should it be about Quest/MyHR/DNS server OS migration, etc.  The SWG mailing list and other mechanisms exist for those purposes.

 

Instead, I'm thinking about news which would tell the majority of those 281 administrators that they have to change something about the way they do their jobs!  So updates would likely be made only every few months, and probably only if UCIST has decided the topic worthy.

 

Also, since this page would be important and rarely updated, a mailing list including every DNS ADMIN could be emailed when the web page is updated.

 

The three examples my page cites are based on problems/discussions I have observed recently.

 

Erick