Handing over leadership of an organization in higher ed
As of today I will no longer be President of the University of Waterloo Staff Association. My last act as President was to chair the first half of the Annual General Meeting and then hand over new business to the new President. I take on the role of Past-President that involves co-chairing the Staff Relations Committee and moving to a more advisory role within the Staff Association organization. As President I have two staff that report to me and was in a leadership position. Now I have to step out of the leadership role but stay involved.
In some sense I am happy that my time is up—another kid is on the way and my sanity is getting harder to find!!! A lot was accomplished thanks to the efforts of the UWSA Executive. I can’t thank them enough for the support, the input, the feedback, and the initiatives they brought to the table. Ideas moved quickly and results are starting to show already. One last accomplishment was signing a Memorandum of Agreement between the Staff Association and the University of Waterloo. It was a necessary step that the organization had to do and the Executive made the decision to get it done without a drawn out feedback process from the membership on the basis that that it does not change the working relationship between the University and the employee only the relationship between the two organizations (UWSA and UW). That lack of process didn’t go over well with some in the membership but it was the right thing to do and I am glad we did it.
I have learned a lot about how a higher education institution functions over the past year. Far more than I learned in six years in the Communications and Public Affairs Office and certainly more than I would have an opportunity to in my current role in the IT department. It is a wonder that the organization functions at times but there is a certain value to the organizational structure that is hard not to admire. Now I am part of that structure co-chairing a committee that has oversight over many University Policies that are related to staff.
At the end of my tenure as President the UWSA seems to be getting back to business as usual. A failed union drive offered opportunity and purpose to strengthen the organization and time will tell if that was actually achieved. One remarkable thing that I have learned about the large group of staff in higher ed is that Peter Drucker needs to be required reading for all higher education workers. His management philosophies are applicable to higher education but sadly the execution of any institution wide management strategy is just isn’t there (yet). Another important thing is that some of the best people anywhere dedicate a lot of time and talent to higher education and academics, I would argue, play a lot lesser role in the ensuring higher education works then some would have you believe.
StartupCampWaterloo: it is about the community
Tonight had to be the most unexpected StartupCampWaterloo yet and it was a load of fun! We had a fairly full room of new faces (60-70) that hadn’t been to a camp event before and really didn’t know what to expect. This left us in a bit of an odd situation as we had no one signed up on the board. So what happened? David Crow made his community pitch to the folks and then everyone introduced themselves as Mic got the names of startups in the room up on the white board.
The number of startups on the white board? 19. There was 19 new startups in the room that were all in fairly early stages. Once all the intros were done and we had a break, a mix of new and some evolved ideas were presented. It was totally not what he had expected for the fourth event but it is exactly what these events should be about. Everything from the project that is being worked on in the basement to a student from Velocity just throwing ideas out there.
The startup community in this town is inspiring.
Validate check box data in rails
A friend is working on a rails app for me that will run the voting for the UW Staff Association. We had some simple requirements and she threw together the app pretty quickly. The poll requires options like ‘select one of three’ or ‘select three of five’ so there had to be check boxes that have id values… look something like:
input id="option[ids][]" name="option[ids][]" value="36" type="checkbox" In the case of ‘select three of five,’ if you accept the value of the input you need to check someone didn’t just change the value of all the boxes to the same so they don’t vote three times for one thing. This was her quick fix:
unless params[:option][:ids].uniq.size == params[:option][:ids].size
flash.now[:error] = "You can't vote for the same thing multiple times in one poll?"
return
end
The check just makes sure the same id’s aren’t submitted twice. Being a total rails novice I expected rails would have some pretty way to do this. The above is good (it works) but I had expected a more elegant data validation… I must expect too much.
Students and campus email problem #42
Email is something higher ed institutions have been providing to students since the beginning of email. Many long-term staff and/or faculty believe it to be a perk while others now simply see it as essential communication. With phones and paper no longer practical ways of official communication, higher ed has been approaching email like corporations when the client (students) see it in a completely different way.
The problem (and my assumption for this post) is that students have an email address before they get to higher ed and they will have it after. For the four years they aren’t going to use some feature crippled email and they aren’t going to switch their primary contact address.
There was an argument a number of years ago for higher ed to provide top notch email to students and encourage them to switch. They will then retain that service as Alumni and retain a great connection with campus. I am not sure that would work anymore.
What students (and Alumni) currently use is their @hotmail or @gmail or @yahoo and that creates a problem. Computers on campus can get compromised, when they do they usually result in the campus domain being blacklisted which means no email is received for a while. IT thinks you fix this by forcing students to use campus email. But that doesn’t change the fact that the higher ed institution can’t contact the rest of the world.
My thought: move your email to a different ‘email’ only domain or move machines on campus to a special domain and stop forcing students to use a bad service. Also stop spending money on a service that no one uses. Email services should be for staff, faculty, and grad students (optional) with forwarding to undergrads email address of choice.
Just a thought.