Communication

Monday’s rambling fiasco did turn up one good thing, I finally made a post detailing some of the “walk the talk” efforts that I’ve been leading with regard to communication from my own team. I talk a lot about communication, but here’s what we are actually doing

From the email:


  1. Billy [Beaudoin] has mentioned this before, but we are running an jabber.org-based IM systems for IT staff in Engineering and elsewhere. This lets the computing staff IM each other directly, and participate in public “chat rooms” with both full-time and part-time staff. It’s turned out to be a great resource, even despite some really bad jokes in the chat rooms. If you want a jabber account, it’s open to any IT staff member on campus. Mail me, Billy Beaudoin, or Josh Thompson.

http://www.itecs.ncsu.edu/systems/site/pages/using-jabber

  1. For almost two months now, the ITECS/Systems staff has been publishing our weekly Activity Notes (sans security/personnel related issues). This a raw braindump of what we are doing, and what’s going in the group.

See: http://www.itecs.ncsu.edu/systems/site/index/StaffNotes

for more information

  1. In March, we published our group’s priorities/practices and a draft list (not yet updated or finalized, and rather vague in places) of possible projects. An outline of this is on the web at:

http://www.itecs.ncsu.edu/systems/site/pages/2005-spring-training-priorities-and-practices

http://www.itecs.ncsu.edu/systems/site/pages/2005-spring-training-candidate-projects

The Keynote-based presentation is not on the web because it included movie snippets from “Field of Dreams” and “Contact”.

  1. ITECS/Systems staff regularly publish updates at the VCL project site:

http://vcl.ncsu.edu

About what’s going on with the project and the work being done.

(see: http://vcl.ncsu.edu/site/index/project in particular)

I’m still trying to get the Project Leadership to use that site to publish information about the vision for VCL, and capture the ideas in weblog and/or wiki form there that they communicate around campus. Getting people to write is a challenge ;-). But I still have hopes that more of those kinds of pieces of information can be published there. Imagine for a moment the opportunity of students and faculty coming to the VCL site to make reservations, or to find help, and then being able to explore the design and project documents that provide a deeper picture of the service. (Yes, I know, there I go again).

  1. In response to a blogs/publications discussion on the TLTR list — we brought up a vhost: “community.eos.ncsu.edu” which is running a copy of the same PHP-based tool we use for a few other sites. This site is “postable” by anyone with a UnityID. It has gained any legs yet, but it’s a potential space for posting and sharing computing and computing use information.