Jan. 13 2017 Caffeine Break – Research IT Conversations

2017-01-13 Research IT Caffeine Break

 Thanks to Laura Herriott for the notes!

Present: John, Laura, Amy, Dena, Kim, Mark, Joe, Tony, Brad, Mike Hallock, Matt, more – total: 19  

Discussion: standards for research support

 

  • Meeting w/researchers to understand needs
  • What do people anticipate the portal to do?
  • Research IT Facilitator new role on campus to make connections between researcher and technology
    • Computer-based testing facility
    • Partnering with Research Data Service and Data Bank or Data Management Plan development
      • Spending time in areas outside of their expertise
      • Best practices workshop tailored to your needs
  • AITS – research project to make PI and business manager work easier. Want to make online proposals available.
    • Key stakeholder: OVCR, OSP (Jan N.)
    • Converting systems and in testing phase
    • PI Portal – for PIs and business managers to look at status of proposal
    • Common software to make siloed connections come together
  • Research phases – would be ideal to have a one-stop shop
    • Proposal process
    • Research process
  • Myillinois.edu
    • What other tools could be linked from that for IT tools
    • For research or other topics
    • Place for “new” tools to emerge
  • Information service capability
  • Campus directory improved searchability
  • Client relationship management tool
    • Who else is doing this on campus?
  • Experts.illinois.edu
    • Profile fatigue (not wanting to fill them out in all these different places)
    • Ingests conferences, co-authors, etc.
    • Integrate
    • Publicly searchable
  • Professor storage needs
    • Long-term preservation and the constraints with various storage options
  • Domain-specific software
    • Webstore accessibility
    • Sharing licenses with collaborators at UIC
    • To be able to see it and know it is not available is helpful
    • System-wide licenses
  • End-point management
    • Self-service software store w/additional access to the information that could be available
  • Purchasing workflow
    • Renewing vs. buying outrights
  • Data infrastructure building blocks
    • Fourseed(?) – metadata attached to scanning electron microscopes
    • Lose metadata during conversion
    • Cloudlette – extract the proprietary filetype
      • Based on BrownDog at NCSA
    • Would like to eventually share with other domains
    • Gianni and Michael Chan are building the capture systems and will create a recipe to share with others
    • Facilitation of dynamic teams working together
    • Existence in the portal and access to someone who can help
    • Target vs. source
  • Portal thoughts: 
    • Should we capture metadata about what stage of the development lifecycle a service is in? Would people want to know about beta/in development services before their “official” launches?
    • Mike H: It’s important to see if something exists even if you’re not yet authorized to use it – that way you can find out if there’s a way to get authorized and connected.
    • Eastern reached out to NCSA to ask about how they got a particular software package. (Answer: it had been licensed in 1984 and continually renewed since then…)
    • Lots of potential contact points for a service – support isn’t the only one. Purchasing, fellow users, training, consulting contacts may also be valuable.
    • Privacy flags may be important for some services, or for some fields within services – ability to make info public, campus-only, or department-only
  • Visibility vs. being overwhelming options
    • Show only vs. show all
    • Self manage information
  • Data transfer issues
    • SSH, RDP lockdowns; VPN
    • Remote desktop gateway
      • Capacity issues
    • Unpatched SSH are the issue
    • RDP failed attempts
    • 2 factor auth as an option
    • VPN has connection issues especially in other questions as well as time limitation timeouts