eTech Year-End Thoughts
One year ago, in January of 2007, we launched C&C Emerging Technology. As we end our first year as a team, I want to take the opportunity to thank everybody in eTech for all of the good work that you’ve engaged in together during 2007. It is an honor for me to get to work with the truly talented people on this team - I know that I personally have learned a lot from all of you this year.
At the time I postulated four themes that we thought would be important in driving our work at the University of Washington during 2007:
1. The importance of the research activity as a driving force for the institution (or, as the Provost more eloquently put it, “Discovery is at the heart of our institution”).
2. To a large extent, science and scholarly activity have become “cyber-science” - that is, research methodologies are being transformed by the possibilities offered by computational power and mass data storage.
3. The emergence of broadly available computing and storage beyond the boundaries of the institution in the Internet “cloud” can enable activities at the UW in new and important ways.
4. The Internet will serve as the platform to enable a broad set of collaborative activities across the institution and among collaborators in multiple institutions across the globe.
During this year we have worked on multiple projects that exemplify those themes. In looking back on the year’s activities, I will admit to being surprised at the extent to which we actually accomplished what we set out to do - a look at the 2007 eTech Roadmap shows a great deal of forward progress! I’m particularly pleased at the success we’ve had in developing relationships with a wide variety of folks both inside the UW (our work with Media Relations, Marketing, the Alumni Association, Development, the units using Departmental Calendars, as well as a wide variety of technology professionals across the campuses) and with colleagues outside the UW (work with other universities and industry groups in middleware projects, our developing relationship with various groups at Microsoft, establishing contacts with Amazon and Google, among others).
Which leads me to add another theme that I think will be particularly important in our work in the coming year:
5. It’s the community, stupid!
Only by leveraging the power of the various communities we participate in will we be successful in our endeavors. This means that each of us should be spending increasing amounts of energy and time interacting with our friends, colleagues, and partners to help accomplish the aims of the University (so if you’re spending most of your time in your office with your door closed staring at your monitor, you really need to get out more).
One of the results of this theme will be that we will be spending considerable effort in 2008 working with others to understand how we can use technology to mobilize and engage communities. One of our first activities on this road will be to enlist the community of technology enthusiasts at the UW in helping us to determine what projects and tasks we should tackle in Emerging Technology during the coming year. In the next few weeks we’ll be posting the projects we’ve thought about to date and asking folks for what we’ve missed or what we’ve got wrong (or hopefully, what we’ve got right). It should be a fascinating opportunity to work with our own community to build shared understanding of priorities for the future.
I wish all of you a happy and healthy New Year, and I look forward to another year of work with all of you!
Tags: etech thoughts themes