Who You Calling a Jesse?

The road trip: San Francisco and Austin (sxswi) notes

For a week in March I did my first big road trip in many years and headed to San Francisco on my way to Austin for SXSWi. With only 3 days in SF and 4 days in Austin I was expecting a pretty intense trip, I wasn’t let down. The goal? In SF it was to meet up with VeloCity alumni (there are around 14 of them I know of there) and find out if there is more VeloCity can do for our students. In Austin it was to purely network and take in all that SXSWi circus has to offer. Every type of marketing strategy is being executed at once by hundreds of different companies; from traditional brands trying new things to crazy useless apps trying to get my attention using the more traditional (but not so classy) booth babe strategy.

San Francisco and the valley

Oh my. I forget how sexy the city of San Francisco is for the entrepreneurial minded. Sure people fall out of love once they get to know it (or think they know it) but if you are wanting to bounce ideas around that is the place. You can meet dozens of different people in a day that will give you dozens of new ways to think about a problem. The weather there is like May in Waterloo without the crazy chance of snow storm so you can walk around comfortably dressed and spend a lot of time outside.

I met up with 10 VeloCity alumni (they have lived in VeloCity before) working for different startups or doing their own thing. Some are very well connected already as they are highly skilled and know their worth. Others are taking notes and plotting their own move. It was great to see them and it was even better to hear their perspectives in the context of the environment we were in.

Austin and SXSWi

What a circus. I booked in late January and the best hotel I could get was the Hampton out at the airport. Thankfully a friend offered up a room downtown which made my experience that much better. Getting around is a nightmare if you aren’t located downtown and you will be tempted to bring your laptop around with you. There is no point in doing that, the internet doesn’t work during the day — far too many people.

What you have in Austin is a great event for networking but don’t go for the talks unless you are there for a few specific ones and you can actually find them on time. I am entirely not sure if the marketing works for all the apps pushing hyper-local services but it is hugely entertaining for those of us there to observe and see all the different things that people try to gain attention. The conversations with people are priceless as well, the event attracts so many leading edge folks. If you are a new startup looking for some validation on what you are building that is the place to be. For more established brands or products like GM, they put on a great show. They even let me drive a Corvette.

It was very cool seeing Kik there as well — they have the most useful chat app but the network suck-age hurt them. I was a bit disappointed because there were a ton more people I wanted to meet and chat with but the best ‘twitter friend I had yet to meet in real life’ moment was bumping into Jonathan Snook in the elevator at the Hampton. How unlikely is that?

A short list of knowledge

The key bits of wisdom sticking in my head:

• The Canadian Angel scene is totally messed up (not news to many) — there are some good angel investors but not nearly enough are spending the time to build relationships with entrepreneurs in Canada or willing to take risks. This is really clear to me now.
• Better connections are needed in the valley for students — not to drive them down there, more to demystify the place and provide them with some solid connections. This could be accomplished through their peers or a group like the C100.
• You never have to eat alone in San Francisco.
• Austin is an awesome city that is totally overwhelmed by SXSW and you will love it.
• If you have any dream to be a community manager or be in marketing you have to participate in the madness at least once but do not plan anything there unless you have been there already.
• Waterloo students are everywhere. Randomly ran into Holden of CS Club fame playing foursquare at the foursquare location, talked with a returning VeloCity resident who is currently working for Foursquare as well.
• VeloCity/Waterloo needs to do more relatively simple things to help our students — even use SXSW as a way to find new and exciting employers for our students on co-op. We can’t stay in Waterloo waiting for people to come to us.

As I plan to sit down over the next few months and pull together a grand strategy for the next little while at VeloCity I am full of crazy ideas. This is good!

What happened to the new co-op system at uwaterloo?

On Friday the University of Waterloo made public the cancellation of the project that was working on the replacement to a PeopleSoft based system the University uses for co-operative education job matching. There is no doubt student media will have some colourful words for the whole thing in the coming weeks although my favorite student voice (OMG UW) has been rather tame. It could be just because the real trolls are off coding somewhere during reading week.

To students, I will say this again in this post, thank the CECS staff you come into contact with for the top quality jobs and the pay scale averages they hold employers too. Jobmine might be a hassle but you wouldn’t have the opportunity to dislike it so much if they weren’t doing a few things amazingly well.

What killed it?

It was 4+ years of work, it had an excellent report and detailed research driving it, and it did have a capable team (Disclaimer: I was on it, I left it, but those that replaced the original team were certainly more than capable). Co-op students and staff that worked on it will have their opinions about specific situations or personalities but I am going to try and take a higher level view.  I have thought about this for a long time but writing it down helps me think it through… so my gut feeling still is that…

Software development was placed in the leadership role of large scale organizational and cultural change.

No one decided to do it this way, not sure anyone realized that is what was happening until it was too far along, but given the report on Co-op and the large scale change that will take years (5+) to implement, the desire to do something now with a software system that is difficult to use (but works) must have seemed like the easiest thing to do quickly. The problem with that, software projects in committee laden environments are really easy to slow down and frustrate. When you toss in impending large scale change the anxiety of the change is directed at the one project that represents it.

My view is that WaterlooWorks is a victim of the process in an atmosphere of large scale change. It was a project that hit head on the cultural issues facing all of higher education and one issue the University of Waterloo is working hard to tackle (at all levels). It was too much change too early. Only in November 2010 was the organizational change in CECS announced, I am certain it was hoped the change would come earlier but I think if you consider what is happening on campus as a whole it took the time it took so it could be successul. The software project started in 2007 but staff knew then change was coming and WaterlooWorks was the first sign of that change.

In the end was the software problematic? Yes, the memo says it was. But it was a product of the process and no one can be blamed for that, we must learn from it as an institution and move on.

Student time is not real world time (4 months = 1 year)

Why the push for software? A theory of mine is that the software project was driven by student time, show changes to Co-op quickly so that the current student FEDs President can see change in the few months that they are actually leading FEDs. Understandably, as students lives change so much every four months at uwaterloo they start to expect big things from themselves and the world they are in a similar time span. That is a good and a bad thing. There are many things that can be done in short time frames but when you are moving an organization the size of uwaterloo it just isn’t realistic. It should be, it will be, but not right now.

I find myself falling into that time warp at VeloCity — a lot changes in four months — so this is something I have only recently come to truly understand or appreciate. As I enter my third year there I gain a lot of perspective though and that time warp starts to develop patterns. I am just now figuring how to take advantage of that and I think it could work with software projects as well.

Building reliable software is hard

The automatic reaction from many that can build web apps will be: “well I could have built that in a term.”

Go for it. At its core the application is just a dating site — it takes resume’s and a light profile, arranges meetings, and lets both employers and employees rank one another. Then an algorithm runs (maybe less complex than eharmony), everyone is hooked up, and students go to work for four months.

What you don’t know is all of the stuff that goes on in the background. For example, each faculty and department has requirements or exceptions that aren’t the same. That requires a rules engine. Once you dig down you find you need a heck of a rules engine. Again not impossible. Start peeling away more and more of the process though and what is a simple application becomes a very large code base.

Build a new jobmine

I say this not to discourage students, please build it. Show people how simple you see the process working, experiment, learn. Take the ‘Apple’ approach and offer only the features needed for the process to work and see what you have. It could be better. My observation is that the complicated process is being simplified by employers anyway (startups — usually run by uwaterloo alumni — recruiting at their own events, collecting resumes, offering on the spot). This works when honest employers do it but it could hurt students as well. Keep in mind, there are a lot of shady folks out there looking for free talent with really crappy jobs. CECS does an amazing job ensuring the quality and pay levels of student jobs.

Rather than get all crazy with disappointment try and understand the circumstances and do what you can do to try and help. Also, you may find the co-op process annoying but take a moment to thank the folks at CECS as those pay scale averages you enjoy as students are 100% the result of the things the staff do extremely well. Maybe software projects aren’t their thing at the moment but what matters more to students — the quality of the jobs or the few days of swearing fits at a dated interface?

…all that said. I am sad it didn’t work. I hope everyone involved reflects on what was right and what was wrong then gives it another shot. I fear that taking so long to go through a process to get to a pilot too much was invested to feel anything but a deep loss.

What is the hot topic in Canadian Higher Education?

I have the pleasure of working with Melissa on her amazing PSEWEB conference in the roll of being an email instigator. Recently a discussion has been going around the advisory group on the keynote and in true committee fashion we are throwing some great thoughts out there but not helping get things done My latest ramble (slightly edited) was the following list:

• Distance education and part-time masters are only now coming to fruition (in established academic/research schools)
• Student experience sucks, focus on ‘student success’ and overall student experience is becoming more intentional — example, creation of the Student Success office at the University of Waterloo
• Other than uwaterloo and maybe some colleges (that have a little potential budget surplus), most schools budgets are in bad shape (are there some that aren’t? Please comment)
• Canadian’s time spent online is higher than the US yet we don’t engage our students that way very well (or do we?)
• Entrepreneurship is the buzz word of our Federal government and looking to education and commercial partnerships is important to all levels of government
• A University President just became Governor General of Canada
• Very little cuts to Canadian research and education when compared to the rest of the G20 countries
• Grade schools are full (to busting) with kids… at least in soem parts of southern ontario, however demographics say student numbers coming from Canada may slow down (some schools have seen that) which means more focus on international recruitment. Can we even predict this?
• Branding madness… sweet f is it irrational. A unified brand across something as diverse as a University seems to be a crusade on a visual level that runs on 5-10 yr cycles when what I think all we really need is a raised level of professionalism across all marketing and communications.

I certainly don’t claim any of those is steadfastly factual besides the Governor General being David Johnston. Any of those points above is a blog post explaining the problem in detail and a lot of them are where a raised awareness of branding and marketing in Canada’s business culture has spilled over into Post-Secondary education. From my perspective as a Past-President of one of the larger staff groups in Post-Secondary education and someone that entered the workforce right as Canadian institutions in Ontario welcomed a ‘double cohort’ of younger first year students with less high school education, I see a (one of at least a few) fundamental challenge in Higher Ed as the following:

The demands for professional organizational management and productivity along with the increasingly specialized focus of academics, renewed expectations placed on academic research being tied to commercialization, along with a long standing (but ignored) issue surrounding student experience in Canada points to Canadian (and maybe global in some respects) Post-Secondary Education being at a crossroads.

I see the marketing and web technology solutions being caught up in the turmoil but it is a big part of the solution. If an institution can deploy a strategy effectively it likely has organizational issues either sorted out or in check. I personally look to startup culture for some solutions and I see many things we could try in higher ed.

What are the hot topics though? Is it measuring the effectiveness of marketing (measuring anything in higher ed is a new thing)? Is it using marketing communications as part of a larger effort to enhance student experience? Is it international branding? Do I even have a grasp on reality with what I see as a (one of many) fundamental challenges in higher ed?

Just to throw this out there was well… I see the University of Waterloo as being in a position to be a major disruptor and really shake up Higher Ed in Canada like it did in its first 25 years with co-op, Math, Engineering, etc. We are getting the right people in the right places across both staff and faculty, all I think we need is the right President that won’t just walk in David Johnston’s foot prints but help lead us down the path that David showed us exists.

Startup thinking featuring the 7cubedproject

Tomorrow is the University of Waterloo IT conference, WatItis. I had planned on doing a talk on Startup thinking and how it relates to higher education using examples out of VeloCity but I had a conflict so decided to feature the best example of that thinking in the residence currently, the 7cubedproject. Why them? I think they are a perfect example of what I was going to talk about — build stuff quickly, get people to use it, move on to something else, be sure to be as open as you can with the process from end to end. That way people know what you are working on and why but also both yourself and those paying attention will learn from your experience.

How that could work in an institutional setting? That depends but to know you can build something and get it out their in a day should certainly work to change the current thinking/process that leaves things to committees that can take years to get something out the door.

On the final day of the 7cubedproject they found themselves on the front page of the local newspaper as well as giving a demo of their stuff to the Provincial Minister of Research and Innovation, Glen Murray. If you are curious as to why he thought he should sneak away from his announcement function at the Tannery in the Desire2Learn space to come talk to a bunch of University of Waterloo students come to the presentation tomorrow.

It will be in RCH 309 at 2:30pm, December 7.

The 7cubed project at the Hub

During this week in November a team of seven University of Waterloo students (six live in VeloCity) are hacking away at building seven applications in seven days. They call themselves the 7cubedproject. To me, this is the most exciting thing to happen at the University of Waterloo since VeloCity was announced… why? Because seven students got together and planned out everything themselves. No company approached them, no one set their agenda, this is just pure passion for building stuff and on top of that they are even skipping classes for a week.

It isn’t that U of Waterloo students have done awesome things on the side that make this special in my mind, it is that they have built a bit of a public relations machine around their coding and thought to do that. They have reached out to companies like Facebook and Google for support, built a blog, video blog, live stream, IRC channel, tweeting, etc. They are conscious of the fact that people might find what they are doing to be interesting enough to watch with their market being schools in the US where they have connections (friends).

Is it a marvel to say uni students know how to use social media? Nope. Countless *experts* have raved about that for 10 years or more. What is remarkable is how well these folks work together and special to see Waterloo students broadcast this off campus experience to the world while beaming a little University of Waterloo pride in the process. For a school in Canada and particularly a school like Waterloo this is special as it isn’t students rallying against a logo or something else, its students building stuff and having fun that is pulling connections together.

It certainly inspires me to work away at more things and keep pushing VeloCity to do even more to build community.