2014 End of the Year Update

Dear UCosmic Stakeholders,

I am pleased to report on progress made regarding options for the accelerated development of UCosmic following our discussions at the stakeholders’ meeting in May.  Given the concurrence of membership at the meeting, we have consulted with the Outercurve Foundation and within SUNY, as well as with the principle UCosmic partner institutions (University of Cincinnati and the University of South Florida),  to determine the most appropriate manner for engagement.  Below are the details of our proposed partnership with the Outercurve Foundation (OCF).

1. UCosmic remains a separate entity, with SUNY as a lead institution until spring 2016 (pending continued availability of grant funds through Santander Bank);
2. UCosmic becomes a Research Accelerators Gallery member of OCF, with no assets transferring over to OCF. OCF will provide service in lieu of annual consortium membership fee;
3. OCF becomes a managing member of UCosmic, with a level of code access on the same footing as other consortium members;
4. OCF helps UCosmic to determine a path forward that may include: a) becoming a separate consortium or foundation, or b) remaining within OCF as a “foundation in a box.”  SUNY would like UCosmic to be a self-sufficient, sustainable set of assets, with a clear governance model and a clear sponsorship model (both in terms of in-kind code and monetary support from consortium members);
5. SUNY and all consortium members will have access to all versions of the code (including the core and any forks created by in-kind contributions).  UCosmic will be released into the open source community as an asset that accrues value back to SUNY and the other stakeholders;
6. With the guidance of OCF, UCosmic will need to create the governance infrastructure and evolve the model from SUNY-led to consortium-led, with a managing class structure proposed, along with a governance board.

At this time we intend to create within the UCosmic consortium the role of managing member and invite OCF to become the managing member. OCF will take over some of the tasks currently being performed by SUNY, and will bring considerable expertise regarding both consortium and open source software development.

To quickly accelerate software development, OCF is poised to organize a hack-day on UCosmic for spring 2015 if member institutions are willing to participate.  This event will produce code that will advance modules (to be identified) within UCosmic.  Please let me know if this is something your institution would like to work on.  Although OCF will do much of the legwork for this event, each member institution will need to assist in organizing its own institutional participation.

Please let me know your thoughts on the proposed OCF engagement. For questions of a more general nature about UCosmic, I ask that you email the general address at info@ucosmic.org. Once OCF is on board, it is our intention to organize a Stakeholder Meeting for some time early in the spring semester. In the meantime, if you have questions or concerns about the proposed plan, please let me know.

Best regards,
Sally Crimmins Villela
Assistant Vice Chancellor for Global Affairs

Reminder: Time Inc Hack Day this Saturday, November 15

Dear UCosmic Stakeholders,

I am writing with news of an event that may be of interest to students at many of your institutions. This is not a UCosmic event; it is an opportunity being offered to UCosmic Consortium member institution students through the Outercurve Foundation.

Students with relevant expertise are invited to participate in the first Time Inc Hack Day in NYC on Saturday, November 15th.  Outercurve is providing 25 free tickets for students from UCosmic member institutions.  The gathering is an overnight event in Tribeca in Lower Manhattan.  Food, drinks, and Wi-Fi will be provided and there will be prizes, which include lunch outings with some of the top names in the NYC media market (including the editors of Time, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, just to name a few!). Students are free to work on whatever coding project they like. This will be a great opportunity for students to get visibility in the NYC media market.

Information about the event and registration is available on this site: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/time-inc-hackathon-tickets-14046337975

We ask that you share this unique opportunity with your colleagues in the appropriate departments on your campuses. Tickets will be distributed on a first-come-first-serve basis through the registration website.

New Agenda for the Stakeholder’s Meeting

I am attaching the updated agenda for the conference as well as the logistical information for getting to the Global Center. For the remote participants, please dial-in using the appropriate number noted below. Some of the presenters will be using PowerPoint presentations. To see the presentations, you will need to login into the online meeting spaces noted below.

As noted earlier, we will have two sets of call-in information for the Stakeholder’s meeting. There is one call-in number, access code, online meeting space and meeting number for the morning and a different set for the afternoon. Participants may dial in and hang up at any time during these calls.

Morning Call-in Information (10 am – 12:30PM)

US TOLL FREE: +1-855-749-4750
US TOLL: +1-415-655-0001
Global call-in numbers: https://suny.webex.com/suny/globalcallin.php?serviceType=MC&ED=276361262&tollFree=1
Toll-free dialing restrictions: http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf
Access code:647 538 751

Online Meeting Space: https://suny.webex.com/suny/j.php?ED=276361262&UID=509733682&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D
Meeting Number: 647 538 751

For assistance
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://suny.webex.com/suny/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click “Support”.
To add this meeting to your calendar program (for example Microsoft Outlook), click this link:
https://suny.webex.com/suny/j.php?MTID=mdc30f156705213eba27cbc75370b51db

To check whether you have the appropriate players installed for UCF (Universal Communications Format) rich media files, go to https://suny.webex.com/suny/systemdiagnosis.php.

Afternoon Call-Information (1:00 PM – 3:30 PM)
US TOLL FREE: +1-855-749-4750
US TOLL: +1-415-655-0001
Global call-in numbers: https://suny.webex.com/suny/globalcallin.php?serviceType=MC&ED=276361752&tollFree=1
Toll-free dialing restrictions: http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf
Access code:644 177 339

Online Meeting Space: https://suny.webex.com/suny/j.php?ED=276361752&UID=509733682&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D

Meeting Number: 644 177 339

For assistance
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://suny.webex.com/suny/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click “Support”.
To add this meeting to your calendar program (for example Microsoft Outlook), click this link:
https://suny.webex.com/suny/j.php?MTID=md296ba0903459bab307e173c1e67f391

Agenda:

10:00 – 11:00 am Introductions
• Sally Crimmins Villela
Update
Assistant Vice Chancellor for Global Affairs, The State University of New York/
Executive Director, The UCosmic Consortium
• Dave Powalyk
Chief Transformation Officer and CIO, The State University of New York

11:00 am – 12:00 pm
• Tim Willis
UCosmic Update
Chief Technology Officer, UCosmic Consortium
• Kiki Caruson, Associate Professor and Assistant Vice President for
Research, Innovation and Global Affairs, University of South Florida

12:00 – 12:30 pm
• Erynn Petersen
Presentation – Open Source Development Models
Executive Director, Outercurve Foundation

12:30 – 1:00 pm
Lunch and discussion

1:00 – 2:00 pm
• Erynn Petersen
Presentation – Outercurve Foundation

2:00 – 3:30 pm Facilitated Discussion
• Sally Crimmins Villela
What are our expectations of UCosmic and where do we go from here?

 

Call-In Information for the UCosmic Spring Stakeholder’s Meeting

We will have two sets of call-in information for the Stakeholder’s meeting. Participants may dial in and hang up at any time during these calls.

Morning Call-in Information (10 am – 12:00PM)

US TOLL FREE: +1-855-749-4750
US TOLL: +1-415-655-0001
Global call-in numbers: https://suny.webex.com/suny/globalcallin.php?serviceType=MC&ED=276361262&tollFree=1
Toll-free dialing restrictions: http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf
Access code:647 538 751

Online Meeting Space: https://suny.webex.com/suny/j.php?ED=276361262&UID=509733682&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D
Meeting Number: 647 538 751

For assistance
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://suny.webex.com/suny/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click “Support”.
To add this meeting to your calendar program (for example Microsoft Outlook), click this link:
https://suny.webex.com/suny/j.php?MTID=mdc30f156705213eba27cbc75370b51db

To check whether you have the appropriate players installed for UCF (Universal Communications Format) rich media files, go to https://suny.webex.com/suny/systemdiagnosis.php.

 

Afternoon Call-Information (1:00 PM – 3:30 PM)
US TOLL FREE: +1-855-749-4750
US TOLL: +1-415-655-0001
Global call-in numbers: https://suny.webex.com/suny/globalcallin.php?serviceType=MC&ED=276361752&tollFree=1
Toll-free dialing restrictions: http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf
Access code:644 177 339

Online Meeting Space: https://suny.webex.com/suny/j.php?ED=276361752&UID=509733682&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D
Meeting Number: 644 177 339

For assistance
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://suny.webex.com/suny/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click “Support”.
To add this meeting to your calendar program (for example Microsoft Outlook), click this link:
https://suny.webex.com/suny/j.php?MTID=md296ba0903459bab307e173c1e67f391

Spring 2014 UCosmic Consortium Stakeholder’s Meeting

Dear UCosmic Consortium Members,

We would like to invite you to attend the Spring 2014 Stakeholder’s Meeting on Tuesday, May 13th at the SUNY Global Center in Manhattan. At this meeting, we will provide an update on developments made to the UCosmic system this past spring and share with you the results of USF’s pilot of the Faculty Activity Module. We have made some adjustments to this module and it is now ready to be piloted by our members.

Dr. Mitch Leventhal recently stepped down as SUNY’s Vice Chancellor for Global Affairs and Executive Director for the UCosmic Consortium. He has taken a position as a professor at the University at Albany in the Department of Educational Administration and Policy Studies, where he plans to pursue research on the evolving role of private equity in education, public-private partnership models and global education strategy. We would like to thank Mitch for his dedication and leadership in developing the concept of UCosmic and the Consortium. Sally Crimmins Villela, SUNY’s Assistant Vice Chancellor for Global Affairs, has taken over as Executive Director and, along with her SUNY colleagues, has been exploring possible development and governance models for UCosmic. We will discuss some exciting options for increasing the number of institutions involved in UCosmic and speeding up the pace of development. Presenters from the Outercurve Foundation and the Open Source Initiative will share models and opportunities that we may decide to pursue in the coming year.

We look forward to this opportunity to learn about the perspectives of the Consortium members and discuss plans for sustainable development of UCosmic.  We hope you will be able to join us for this important meeting.  Members should RSVP to Rebecca Smolar at rebecca.smolar@ucosmic.org.

Call-in numbers will be provided for those who are unable to attend in person.

 

Agenda:

10:00  – 11:00
Introductions, All attendees
Update
Sally Crimmins Villela and the SUNY Team

 

11:00 – 12:00
UCosmic Update

Tim Willis, UCosmic Chief Technology Officer
Kiki Caruson, Associate Professor, and Assistant Vice President for Research, Innovation and Global Affairs, University of South Florida

 

12:00 – 1:00
Lunch
Presentation by Open Source Initiative
Patrick Masson, General Manager, Director and Secretary to the Board

 

1:00 – 2:00
Presentation by Outercurve Foundation
Erynn Peterson, Executive Director

 

2:00 – 3:30
Facilitated Discussion: What are our expectations of UCosmic and where do we go from here?
Sally Crimmins Villela

Departure of Dan Ludwig, CTO

After eight years working for UCosmic, first as Graduate Assistant then as Applications Analyst, and finally as Chief Technical Officer of UCosmic, Dan Ludwig has left to pursue another opportunity. We thank him for those years of service and wish him every success with his new assignment. Dan has agreed to continue to assist UCosmic development as an external technical adviser. We all have full confidence in Tim Willis’s ability to proceed with development priorities until a new CTO can be put in place.

If you have any technical questions, please contact Tim at Tim.Willis@suny.edu. If you have any other concerns, please contact Claudia Hernandez at Claudia.Hernandez@suny.edu.

February 2014 UCosmic Update

Dear UCosmic Consortium Members,

There are many updates to report on the UCosmic site!

1. On the Alpha Site, UCosmic Consortium Members can now add their own institutions.  When you are adding a new agreement and you cannot find the partner institution, you can add it with the new “Add New” feature. Also, when you are editing your UCosmic profile’s formal education, you can add your Alma Mater. If the Alma Mater is not there, you can add the institution. Once a month, I will vet the newly added institutions.

2. As noted in the fall Stakeholder’s Meeting, UCosmic Consortium Members can now download an excel spreadsheet for the Agreements Module. Please note, we will be adding a few more columns in the coming weeks, so that you can download additional information.

3. API is now ready for both the Agreements and Faculty Module.

4. In the Faculty & Staff Module, the Advanced Search (Table) and Advanced Search (Map) capacities are now functioning as well.

Finally, I am preparing a focus group interested in preparing a Spring pilot of the Faculty and Staff Module. Email me if you are interested.

Rebecca Smolar

January 2014 Update

We are happy to announce the launch of the updated UCosmic® Consortium site, including a brand new section entitled “Conference Recap”. Under this category, you can find featured information from the 1^st Annual UCosmic® Conference, including group photos and speakers’ PowerPoint presentations. By clicking on the speaker’s name found in the agenda, you can review corresponding presentations from each panel.

If you have not already done so, please take the time to Subscribe via Email to the UCosmic® Blog. By signing up, you can have monthly updates like this one sent directly to your inbox. You will see that our last blog post included a proposal to drop support for Internet Explorer versions 9 and lower. The decision has since been made to officially drop support; please review the list of compatible browsers below.

Recommended browsers include:

• Google Chrome, any version
• Firefox, version 4 or above
• Safari, version 5 or above

Accepted browsers included:

• All browsers featured in recommended list above
• Internet Explorer, version 10 or higher

We do not anticipate that many issues will arise from this change, but if you have any questions or concerns, please contact Program Assistant Jen Nevins at Jen.Nevins@ucosmic.org or Program Manager Rebecca Smolar at Rebecca.Smolar@ucosmic.org.

UCosmic Consortium proposes dropping support for Internet Explorer versions 8 and 9

We would like to propose dropping support for Internet Explorer versions 8 and 9 for the further development of the UCosmic software project. For developers, Internet Explorer (IE) is notoriously the worst web browser to program against for a wide variety of technical reasons. While most problems can be solved (though some cannot), the code ends up with defaults that “just work” in every other major popular browser, sprinkled with many special treatments to accommodate for using IE8. UCosmic has some existing code and plans for more advanced user experience interfaces using technologies that IE8 simply predates.

Additionally, the Windows operating system will only let you install one version of Internet Explorer at a time. In order for a developer to test against IE8, it must be installed on the development workstation. If we are developing against IE8, this means that we are unable to test against newer versions like IE10 or IE11. Internet Explorer is constantly playing catch-up with Google Chrome and Firefox, so it has been releasing new versions more frequently. IE11 was released on October 17^th 2013.

What about IE9?

IE9 no doubt offers many improvements over IE8. Microsoft accomplished a lot of this by inventing a new code-running engine which they call “Chakra”. Though Chakra enables many newer technologies that IE8 lacked, there are some things it just does not do fast enough (namely, drawing Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG’s)). Many of these performance-related issues were solved pretty well in the next version of Chakra, IE10. We propose dropping support for IE9 because these performance-related issues can give the impression that UCosmic is slow, when in fact it is the IE9 browser which is slow, on those pages where we employ SVG components.

What are the cons?

Dropping support for IE8 and IE9 means that we will not be able to guarantee that the UCosmic user interface behaves as expected in these two browsers. In fact, for some features, we will be able to guarantee that they will not work in IE8. As far as data integrity, there is no way that a user could corrupt or in any way affect data by accessing UCosmic in IE8 or IE9. The concern is simply that the user interfaces may not look right or operate as expected.

Another con is that the Microsoft Windows XP operating system does not support any version of IE after IE8. Users on the Windows XP operating system would not be able to access UCosmic using Internet Explorer on those machines. They would have to use a more modern browser like Google Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.

Therefore, without purchasing virtual machine software or having developers spend unnecessary time installing different versions of IE, the best we can do is hope that the code’s defaults work in those versions, and wait for a frustrated user to tell us otherwise.

Why have you kept support for these browsers so far?

We have kept support for IE8 and IE9 primarily because we expected users in other countries to still be using IE8 browsers. Not everyone upgrades at the same pace, and there are many computers around the world that still run Windows XP. However, that number remains on the decline, therefore reducing the value added by additional coding efforts to support it over time.

The second reason is because of the nature of IT in much of academia today. I can offer an example directly from the University of Cincinnati: The Human Resources division here uses SAP software, which offers a web portal for Employee Self Service. That portal is an older piece of software that hosts pertinent employee information like W2 forms and annual health coverage enrollment verifications. This outdated system will not work in any browser except IE8. There are other legacy systems like these that cause people to delay or avoid upgrading browsers because their need to access these other systems trumps UCosmic.

What do you need from me?

If you are indifferent about the decision, you don’t need to do anything. We will tell you in a later blog post when a decision has been reached. If you agree that the UCosmic software project should drop support for Internet Explorer browser versions 9 and below, please leave a comment below. If this decision is approved, our first recommendation for users would be to update IE to versions 10 or 11 if you wish to use them for UCosmic. For users who cannot update IE or would prefer to keep an IE 8 or 9 installation, our recommendation would be to use either the Firefox or Chrome browser for UCosmic.

If you disagree, tell us why we should keep support for one or both of these browsers. However when doing so, please keep in mind the potential advantages of our argument, so that we can fairly weigh them against yours. If a significant discussion arises out of this, we will begin a dialogue with those parties who have expressed interest in the matter.

What are the pros?

There will be fewer special cases to handle for these versions of IE, meaning the developers can develop a leaner, more consistent set of code, faster and cheaper. We will also be able to take advantage of newer technologies that are ubiquitous in modern machines and browsers, including those used for smartphones and tablets. UCosmic will not appear slow because of performance problems in IE9 that were solved in IE10. Finally, developers will be able to accurately test user experiences in IE10 and IE11, because they will not have to keep IE8 or IE9 installed on their workstations.

SUNY hosts the First Annual UCosmic® Conference

On October 31st, the UCosmic® Consortium hosted its first annual conference: Collaborative Software Development to Address Strategic Challenges in Higher Education: Kuali, VIVO and UCosmic®.

Held at the SUNY Global Center, the conference provided highly relevant discussions on shared challenges and opportunities, largely facilitated by speakers by the three open-source, higher education consortia: UCosmic®, Kuali and VIVO.

“The conversations surpassed my expectations. I have some immediate, concrete, take-aways and there are some very important issues that I think we need to move up our agenda. Speaking for me and for UCosmic®, we’ve learned an enormous amount and I really do hope that this is the beginning of an ongoing dialogue” said Mitch Leventhal, SUNY’s Vice Chancellor for Global Affairs and Executive Director of UCosmic®.

Topics included fulfilling strategic operations with big data, consortia-led development, governance structures, decision-making and prioritization, applications roll-out, privacy and policy, and strategies for fostering adoption.

Speakers included Hao Wang, SUNY’s Chief Information Officer, Mitch Leventhal, SUNY’s Vice Chancellor for Global Affairs, Eric Denna, Chief Information Officer for The University of Utah and Utah System of Higher Education, and many others.

Following the conference on November 1st, the UCosmic® Consortium also hosted its Fall Stakeholder’s meeting at the Global Center. Members convened to discuss the UCosmic® Consortium development timeline, best practices, and the possibilities of future collaboration and data exchange amongst the three software initiatives.

For information on UCosmic® membership, please email Jen.Nevins@ucosmic.org.