January 28th brings another Data Protection Day. Five years ago today we launched UC Berkeley’s “bConnected Transparency Report” to give our students, faculty, and staff a clear idea about how the University handles their personal information in services like Google, Box, and Sharepoint.
As a manager, in addition to the tactical discussions, I like to have conversations with my staff every so often about where they’d like to be in a year, and in 2–3 years. Good coaching helps people articulate their goals and then visualize the path to achieving them.
We live in a world awash in data. As individuals and as a society we need to learn how to better understand, analyze, and use it. To that end, Berkeley recently started an exciting initiative to teach every undergraduate the fundamentals of data science.
The most salient recent developments have been in focusing our work to align with the Chancellor’s strategy – in the case of cloud computing, especially towards support for scaling up Jupyterhub to meet the needs of the Division of Data Sciences.
The API Department’s Web Access team helps units all over UC Berkeley assess how their websites and other technologies work for people with disabilities, and recommends improvements where needed.
I wanted to share a brief overview of UC Berkeley’s Cloud Strategy so that anyone can get a sense of it in a few minutes. The most important takeaway is that it directs our focus always to be ‘University First’. As a campus, we must invest in technology that meets the needs of the campus mission for our faculty, students, and administration – rather than focusing on technology first or ‘Cloud First’.