Who You Calling A Jesse?

The Canada 3.0 started today in Stratford Ontario (45km west into farm fields from Waterloo) and surpassed a lot of people’s expectations I think. The morning had the typical political talk you would expect when government folks are given a microphone along with the University of Waterloo making it clear it is committed to the Stratford campus and all the potential developing such a campus may hold. What followed was a day of great conversation about communities, what to do to foster entrepreneurial talent, mobile technology, and more.

It was high level discussion mostly but it was honest discussion focused not on how great Canada is but where Canada needs work. Have a look at the twitter stream under the #can30 hash tag for some great bits of information. Day 2 promises to be more interactive with work groups tackling some of the issues presented today.

I spent a lot of they at the VeloCity booth talking to people that are interested in the idea and colleagues at other schools that are a bit envious that Waterloo has such a residence. I will be around for day 2, stop by the booth and say hi!

After a few weeks of going back and forth with all the internal workings it is now official, I am one of two new Associate Directors at U of Waterloo’s incubator 2.0 residence, VeloCity. I join Virginia McLellan (the other Associate Director) and Sean (Director) as the new team to really push things into something really great (and fun).

The residence has come a long way in last 8 months since it started taking on students. With more investment in people to help push the direction we plan on building more of a community around VeloCity, trying out new things, and seeing where we can go. It is very exciting to be involved in such an innovative and fast moving project.

Can’t wait to get started.

Karlyn Morissette has set her ’biggest problem in Higher Education’ on the total inefficacy of higher education institution and how that is enshrined in the culture. I agree. From my viewpoint, Staff and Faculty in Higher Education spend far too much time in committees that have no mandate or authority (or even an agenda or a chair). The "building of consensus" for every little thing paralyzes progress and forces what I see as a continuous pursuit towards mediocrity.

Examples given in Karlyn’s post we see every day in higher ed (committees, endless pursuit of a pet project). The problem gets a lot worse when you look at some of the typical decision making processes that have layers of committees that stretch over months with 12 or so people on each of them. In the case of grad admissions or research funding, committees don’t make decisions but instead push an application up to another committee to consider. Finally someone might make a decision but usually that some one is in no position to make a proper decision as they have no idea what they are deciding on. They just sign the paper and move on.

Time is money except in Academia where time builds authority

To me this boils down to a lack of appreciation for people’s time (at least in Canada, specifically Ontario). It is understandable from the academic viewpoint, you have been in school all your life. Getting a phd is a long process and that process works. An academic’s time has little value over simply having their presence on campus as their entire purpose is to think and do research. Their work hours are open, this is their life. Unless the committees get in the way of their research or teaching there is no real cost.

However, staff time is different. At a guess, historically higher ed (being run by academics) hired clerical staff for clerical tasks. They weren’t required to make decisions as the academics were in charge. With 1000 or so students that might have made sense. As institutions grew they hired more professional staff. Professional staff hired more professional staff to help manage the business of the institution. These professionals are often more skilled and necessary to ensure a level of service. However, academics ensured the committee processes remained in place and that they had final say. This does nothing to empower staff and the skilled professionals that couldn’t accept that left higher ed in the 80’s (at Waterloo anyway). Larger, older institutions seemed to simply professionalize phd/academic roles which laid down the academic committee process that leaves decisions with academic chairs and Deans.

Note: The evolution of academia in North America and beyond is a thesis topic methinks… so my abridged assumptions shall end here ;)

The culture was enshrined over the 1990’s and the insane cut backs that higher education had to deal with. New staff didn’t come in, culture took over. I would assume that the reality of ‘it is easier to beg forgiveness’ always has been present but I found when I started working in Higher Ed that it was the only way to get anything new done. Sadly that approach is wrong (most of the time). It is wrong because sure you change things but you don’t have lasting change. You simply embarrass other people and get shut out of any future process. On the rare occasion you succeed in sparking lasting change but you have still marginalized yourself and others to get there. That isn’t a good way to do things.

Identify value, document process, and stop doing things that don’t need to get done

In order to have lasting change you need to participate in the process, ask questions, understand why people fear change, and give them a big nudge in the right direction. Lead by example, act professional, and be kind to those that will attack you for what you doing. It isn’t easy but in the medium term you will see change. After 8 years working in Higher Education I am convinced that no amount of positive change is worth treating people poorly. If someone makes it impossible to do anything then bulldoze them but I doubt you will have to fight the bully if you build support by other means.

There are a few simple things you can do that borrow from the world of Project Management, Drucker, Roberts Rules, and others:

• Ensure a committee meeting always has an agenda
• Identify the Chair, support the Chair in keeping the meeting on track
• Identify who makes decisions and what is required in order to have a decision made
• Identify who will carry out the decisions
• Do not take things personally even in the face of obvious personal attacks
• Track your time on task, report it to your manager on a weekly basis
• If you are working on a project, get agreement on what ‘finished’ means (open ended projects are probably the worst specific waste in higher ed)
• Identify what you expect to get out of the project
• Figure out what doesn’t need to get done and stop doing it

All these things help identify value in what you are others that are working with you are doing. That value will help make people feel better. If they feel better about what they are doing they are more likely to take risks on the current project or one in the future.

Organizational waste, inefficiencies, etc will not be fixed over night in higher education. But making an effort now (especially in the face of cuts) will help in the future.

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.

Do you want to make the system better? Do you want people to use your code? Do you want to work with me? It is close to the end of the first round in co-op here at Waterloo and we have a couple jobs posted. Here is the jobmine info so you can find it easier:

Winter 2009 Co-op 00092349 Software Developer
Winter 2009 Co-op 00092354 Software Developer – Q/A
Winter 2009 Co-op 00092662 User Advocate

We need some passionate students that are keen on web technology to get us to the pilot stage in the spring. Do you think you are up for it?

The technology you get to play with is mostly Microsoft – SQL, .NET, etc – but the GUI likes to use jQuery (before Microsoft decided it was cool).

Today we opened up a blog dedicated to staff issues at the University of Waterloo that is hosted by the UW Staff Association. At the moment I am the only one writing for it but that is sure to change as other Past Presidents. The idea of the blog is to keep staff informed on issues and give them a chance to have a conversation on topics important to them.

I decided to go with Expression Engine for this blog. It offers a load of options and it has a pretty powerful template engine. Where it has driven me a bit nuts is just figuring out how it works. Being use to WordPress prettiness or even Simplelog on this site, Expression Engine has a lot of features. Thankfully you can ignore them! I will post more about Expression Engine when I get a chance.

Hopefully the UWSA blog will be useful to staff in all higher education institutions. I don’t think we will post only about Waterloo although there will be a lot of examples from Waterloo ;)

Almost a year ago now I started exploring the idea of a research paper on Microformats with regards to Higher Education. After doing some research I settled on assessing ten Higher Education web sites, their mark-up and their content, identify some common patterns and explore the viability of Microformats for the typical Higher Education home page.

• You can grab a version of my paper in acrobat.com but if you want a PDF version please leave a comment.

In my paper you will find a literature review, the method I used, all the data, and my results. I did write this over the winter so things might have changed a bit and it certainly isn’t a perfectly written paper… but I think it offers a way to approach semantic mark-up that I hope some people find useful.

From my research, I developed a process to identify a design pattern for Higher Education web sites in both the mark-up code and the content. It may not be the most efficient but it seemed to do the trick.

I used those design patterns to come up with a mock-up of what the University of Waterloo home page could be (not graphically, just semantically) and tried out how that could be useful. My mock-up has:

• hAtom for news
• hCal for event listings
• hCard for the University address with geo information

There is also some other semantic richness in there. I thought that maybe someone would find it useful as there really isn’t a lot of research with regards to applying Microformats and why.

update: I have another post that looks at how Microformats can help higher education

Illya posted some thoughts on Agile Release & Testing Procedures and instead of writing a big long comment I figured it was worth a blog post. At the University of Waterloo I have had experience deploying a number of different applications for a variety of audiences… it is next to impossible to get all the details in a post but here is the general truth: there are no enforced institutional wide procedures for web applications. You might think the lack of procedures is bad but it is a result of the relatively low risk environment (even though the campus community has a low tolerance for bugs and changes). There are rarely formal teams of developers, it is mostly the loan coder building a specialty application – enforced procedures would frustrate them.

When you are dealing with a simple web page, say the uni home page, I have essentially covered the typical user acceptance, performance, and stress tests when the page goes live. I go through the gamut of web browser testing, try some OS variations out, and then get it out there. There is a relatively low risk here as the users don’t interact with a database or a whole heck of a lot client side. Once rendering issues are dealt with, it is pretty much unlikely to have other issues. This is with 30 000 or more people seeing it within a short period of time too. I had relative success but I think it was more luck and the fact we kept web pages simple.

Stepping up the development a bit, throw in a Ruby on Rails or PHP application. My testing procedures involved pretty much the same as the web page testing: poke away at it, fix bugs as they appear, and get it ready to go off of the development server to production. We (co-op student and I) never really sat on changes very long. The thinking was that if it went bad on the production end we just roll back the version, fast. When I made the jump to Ruby on Rails development with Capistrano and SVN that became so easy it was scary. On many occasions we had new versions going up two or three times a day. Minor changes, but they add up. This meant a lot of bugs made it out to the community version but as a whole the community appreciated seeing the progress. Our harshest critics were few and usually the type of people that would sit on things until they are perfect, the web is never perfect.

Now I find myself in the .NET/C# development world. I am happily hacking away at the JavaScript on the front end but I still live in the development environment. Here we have a solid team, a lot of developers, some serious tools, and totally different requirements from the client relationship/expectations end. At the moment we are doing limited testing that makes sure it works and then pushing it to an environment that a group has a ‘sanity check’ and gives us feedback. Releases are going out on a weekly build routine with a daily routine for an internal release. The whole process is evolving as we go but in a very general sense we are aiming to maintain a weekly build schedule for one set of users, daily internally. Our goal is to not leave the application in a non-working state and at any time the build could go live. This habit takes time to develop though… I don’t expect us to be in the groove until over the summer.

That is the nutshell version of what I have had experience with, I suppose it is Agile without the buzz terms. Personally I don’t see a reason why any web application couldn’t work on a daily build process. If you break the big change down to a lot of little changes you reduce the risk of breaking it and you ensure stability (so the theory goes). The problem is that in order to break a big thing down to a bunch of little things you need to take the time to talk it out, plan it out, and scope out what goes into a big thing. It is a way of thinking and it doesn’t happen overnight, most people need experience thinking that way.

I am interested to know what other higher education folks are doing with release and testing procedures.

This Saturday is BarCampWaterloo (number 6!) from 1pm to around 7pm (we may retire to the pub before that) at the Accelerator Centre. A much more toned down event compared to StartupCampWaterloo, BarCampWaterloo is where people come to explore ideas and maybe get themselves ready for a DemoCampGuelph (which happens to be April 9th at the Albion in Guelph). I might show some of the stuff I have been working on this weekend ;)

DesignCampWaterloo is March 26th (Wednesday)27th (Thursday) starting at 4:30pm in the Tathum Centre on the University of Waterloo campus. The first one was a bit difficult to follow being in the SLC and all so I am really looking forward to it in the TC. Plus I just have to go up two floors from my office to attend!

There is also a RailsNite next week on Monday at Ceaser Martini’s. Not sure of the start time but I think 7ish might work.

Update: RailsNite does start at 7pm and there is a Facebook event created for it.

Another update: Rick Segal is not coming to Waterloo for his VC roundtable, but he is coming to Guelph on April 28th… Perhaps Ali is influencing people now.

Yet another update: DesignCampWaterloo is Thursday not Wednesday.

You work on something for a couple weeks and then the due date comes close. There is a realization that you won’t meet the milestone unless you get a lot of code written today and deal with whatever UI issues and browser bugs you can. You order in some pizza, fill up on caffeine, and push through a 16 hour or more work day. There is something about that role you get on when you don’t leave your computer, things just make more sense.

My GUI team of co-op students have been pushing themselves this past week and this evening I think they achieved more tonight than all of last week. People will have to wait until May 1st to see it but our internal deadline is much earlier (demos to some stakeholders first and we need April to bug hunt). Maybe I will demo a bit at DemoCampGuelph in April or BarCampWaterloo ;)

Just wanted to post a just over mid-term thanks to Daniel, Shawn, Allen, and Michael for the commitment. They have gone from CS or Engineering students to fairly good AJAX developers in a very short time period. They have made some cool stuff, can’t wait to show it off.

It is interview time here at Waterloo. It happens once every four months, thousands of students and employers enter a dating game for talent and experience. Waterloo is a bit unique having a building dedicated to the process (just happens to be where my office is) and a frequency of three times a year for the process to run. Large companies like Google, RIM and Microsoft are hear hiring large numbers of students but so are local startups like AideRSS and Semacode along with all sorts of companies from different fields and different sizes. Posters on the walls with all the different information sessions show all the opportunities for students.

Why do the companies come here? Waterloo has the talent and I would argue there is far more and better talent than Stanford (update: Larry disagrees or does he?). Our students go to the Valley or Seattle or Boston or Ottawa and all points in-between to work for big names and get started on their carriers while they are working on their undergrad (or grad) degrees. A lot them stay local (Google and RIM are in Waterloo, along with a lot of other interesting employers) and even more would like to stay local for a term or two if a great job can be found.

For local web/tech startups this is a great opportunity. If you developing an idea and you need someone that can code and wants to contribute, for around 10K you can get a junior student for four months to do that. Senior students are more but you get higher quality and more experience. Just to prove a startup concept though, a junior co-op student is inexpensive and hugely beneficial.

The project I am working on depends on the quality of Waterloo Co-ops. We are building a new system to run the job/dating game and have a great bunch of students to do that. They code, they ask questions, they learn, they are excited, and they build really cool things from your ideas. Over the years I have worked with a number of different students and all of them made me look good—which is what you want when you hire someone, right? ;)

There is a side benefit to local startups hiring students I think as well. If you keep the students here, keep them engaged, and get them excited about trying out their ideas you help the local community build resources. I think it’s one part of the puzzle that may help Waterloo’s stealthy startup scene become even more open and exciting.

If you are wondering how to hire a co-op, contact CECS and they will have you set up in no time.

My ‘other job’ at the moment is President of the University of Waterloo Staff Association which represents 1800 or so staff and today I initiated the public part of a process with our members that I believe will make the organization relevant, effective, and very unique. The UWSA is not a union nor does it conduct itself much like a union. People choose to be members of the organization and pay a relatively low flat fee, we don’t do collective bargaining, and we don’t resort to arbitration.

Instead we work with the University Administration to ensure staff have a voice on policies that directly effect them as keep on top of issues like working conditions, pensions and benefits. We also assist staff in navigating those policies, understanding their pensions and benefits, and answer any questions they may have about their employer. Just recently the UWSA finished re-writing the dispute resolution policy making it more ‘usable’ and effective for both staff and administration. Major changes were presented today.

This work along with the expectations of the staff for a level of service have made it nearly impossible to function effectively with the limited resources we have (we collect $5 a month from members currently). I introduced today a strategy that would have a new constitution for the organization approved by members no later than early Feb 2008, a new full-time position of Executive Manager created, and a small increase in resources through a staggered increase in fees in the near future with a an eye on a very large reserve of resources in the future. If you would like some detail, the slides are available in a PDF.

The idea isn’t to be a union but to be a more service oriented organization that has the ability to make some serious moves to assist members if it needs to. With more resources comes the ability to offer services such as (no way near exhaustive list here): interest free loans for education and training outside of UW, daycare subsidies, larger and more student awards for members children, awards for members children not attending UW, heavier discounted tickets for things, build a community presence, etc. This list needs to be expanded and other ideas need to be considered as yet.

With the lack of UWSA blog and/or forum I invite staff to comment here. Yes the comments are moderated (keeps SPAM away) but I will strive to post all comments on the topic. Ideas and feedback are welcome.