Page PageSusan M. Johns
11th Annual CODA Conference
University of South Australia
Adelaide, South Australia
September 30-October 2, 1998
I bring you greetings and warm wishes from the CODI Board and all CODI members in the United States. I bring with me two visualisations that may help to illustrate some of CODI's activities this past year.
Recently, a colleague showed me a colour laser print of an 11th century Chinese Sung dynasty scroll painting. When unrolled from right to left, the scroll portrayed an ancient scholar/poet who traveled his world as globally as he could, given the time of his existence.
The scholar/poet travels through fields and meadows, stopping to fish at a stream, working alongside a few native fishermen to help him row across a river. Sometimes he joins fellow travelers along a river or creek for a campfire supper. The next day, he scales a large mountain range, sometimes alone, sometimes with a companion--over rocks, over brush, through forests, up to the top, down again into the valleys or canyons.
For the most part, he walks alone, with perhaps a chance encounter with a farmer, or oxen, or perhaps a nest of birds. Each bridge the poet/scholar crosses provides choices and opportunities. Each road he looks down presents a mystery in the mist. Eventually, the poet/scholar returns home, resuming a sense of security, but altered by the experiences he has encountered.
The story of this poet/scholar's travels, and to an extent, his very life, unfolds in an archetypal description of a series of Chinese painting, written by James Cahill, as "The Lyric Journey". The metaphor of the poet/scholar's journey is not unlike what we in an information age traverse through on a daily basis as system administrators.
We may read documentation in solitude, or we may travel by phone alongside a customer support person. Often we go fishing--perhaps on Dynix_l, or among our regional user groups. Sometimes the path is steep; we travel alone, in darkness, and stumble.
Sometimes at the end of the day we may find ourselves alone; surrounded by the whirr of lights and the clicking of network routers in a sort of nightnoise symphony. Sometimes, we venture beyond the gate, over the bridge, to a conference, where we meet up with new faces and new ideas. We may join others at the banks of the creek for food and refreshment.
Finally, we return home, back to more ups and downs, peaks and valleys, to the relative security of our own machine rooms and to the institutional policies and the problems of our every day lives. We struggle, we succeed. How we struggle or succeed can vary from day to day and time to time.
While James Cahill's "The Lyric Journey" principally describes Chinese poetry and art from 500 to 1,000 years ago, I believe it also describe our own daily efforts.
We must stop and ask ourselves, however, where is the beauty? what is the poetic? How do we return to simplicity and the nature that we long for amid our gizmos and mice and blinking CPU lights and the whirr of disk drives, the beeps of network routers, and the formidable blue screens of death? Is there beauty here somewhere among us today? Is there art? Is there a lyric quality?
I suspect that there is, or else all of us present today would not have journeyed through hill and vale to meet with one another to learn, to teach, to listen, to instruct, and to enjoy the camaraderie that only system administrators can share with one another. We have become a part of the "lyric" that reaches out beyond our own boundaries, which pursues the ideal and the best for our work, and which reaches out to dream and grasp our visions of the ideal for the future. This same pursuit of the lyric causes us to reach out to a global world, to a global commitment from our software vendor, and to a global experience among our peers and colleagues.
Right before I left Pittsburg State University, in that global location in the central U.S. known as Kansas, I asked one of our reference librarians, a native Chinese speaker, whether my analysis on this lyric journey was ringing true--did it make sense, was it clear?
Yes, she said, but remember the volcanoes. What volcanoes?, I asked. In China, she said, the mountains are volcanoes. Remember, don't step on any live volcanoes.
So, the question begs to be asked, what are your live volcanoes? What are our live volcanoes? System software upgrades? Migrations? Tenders? Lack of resources, lack of funding? Excess governmental regulation? Slow response time? Too small a pipe to the Internet?
National Geographic Explorer reports on a program describing Montserrat, "It is in the nature of volcanoes to create as they destroy." Is that not also true for the creation, the destruction, the life cycles of our systems?
CODI as an organisation also has its volcanoes. CODI's agenda this year continues to include many ways to strengthen our ties with our global peers. We continue to support and rely heavily on Dynix_L. I was delighted to hear Ross Welch say yesterday that the Australian office often feels like mission control -- "we read about it on Dynix_L, now when can we have it and when can your office do it?" This fall we will continue developing the CODI Web page to provide more accurate links to past and current newsletters, various project reports, and conference proceedings, as well as our regional organizations. You, our Australian colleagues, continue to support Dynix_L with the CODI archives, located here at the University of Adelaide. I am delighted that I have finally been able to meet the keeper of the archives, Steve Thomas, in person.
CODI Board members have begun regular email correspondence on various global issues with our counterparts on the Canadian CANDU Board, and have begun talks with the Horizon officers on possibilities for concurrent conferences beyond the year 2000. Taking a cue from Brian Hackett's proposed Federation draft, the CODI Board is beginning to develop more formal liaison with both the DUG and CODA Boards, in the hopes of enriching more cultural awareness across the continents and, obviously, within the software.
CODI continues to examine its role and identity in a global environment, one in which we want to continue to play a leading and positive role. We continue to examine opportunities with our vendor in advocating for strong user input, training, and continuing education for our members. We continue to take seriously our commitments to provide the best possible liaison for our members and to continue to promote fiscal responsibility as a not-for-profit organization. We are actively sharing newsletters, foreign correspondence, and seeking new ways to stay in contact with one another.
Close to 20% of CODI's total membership budget is earmarked for travel to our peer international conferences, which we believe to be a significant means for interaction, listening, and joint collaboration with our colleagues abroad.
While we may appear to be structurally more organized, CODI is not without its dilemmas, or volcanoes. There is one "volcano" that stands out among several CODI issues, one that is neither dormant, nor able to lie down and sleep, or even "go away". It is what many of you have hoped for and understood to be a path toward future product development. The "live volcano" this year is what we affectionately referred to last year as "system enhancements".
This leads me to my second visualization, which I promised you earlier. Assume for a moment that this deck of cards represents individual user requests from all around the globe, enhancements we have all submitted and anguished over. Perhaps these might represent all those enhancement requests we have logged, or wish we had logged, on CODI-ED. Please watch closely as I try to paint a vivid picture of what I personally feel is the current state of all enhancements -- in CODI, around the world, in the universe. (shuffling playing cards outward and upward over the front row of the audience)
Out of this apparent chaos, there is a plan, and there is a program, but it involves letting go of the old process, picking up the pieces, and working hard to implement the new. If those of you in the front row have this absolute urge to get down on your hands and knees and pick them all up, resist!
Many of you have heard of JAD, the Joint Application Development process, which CODI began this past year. Formal documentation and details concerning JAD are located on the CODI and ALS Web page, and have been distributed on Dynix_L and in your CODA newsletter this summer.
To highlight just a few of the details, the JAD process relies on the ALS Product Plan for direction and future product development. After the Product Plan is announced, various JAD projects for the year are identified, and global participants are invited to assist in design, development, and testing of the new projects.
Since March, four JAD projects have begun; Telecirc II, Serials Binding, the Staff Workstation Project, and a web-based training initiative. Telecirc II is complete at this time. Serials Binding and the Staff Workstation are now in early stages of JAD analysis. The Staff Workstation project is also being jointly staffed by both Dynix and Horizon participants. CODI and ALS envision that the majority of JAD projects will provide many opportunities for global sites to become active participants at the design and development stage.
Areas that JAD does not currently address are issues relating to:
The primary purpose of this database will be to allow developers to see what clients are asking for before they start on a project, and will permit clients to dream and propose specifications well in advance of announcement of product plan projects. CODI will continue to review JAD and refine it as necessary throughout the coming year.
All of this, however, is not possible without your participation. JAD will only be as successful as the volunteers and creative resources of those involved in it. The potential is great: the ownership and responsibility of the participants, whether in the US or around the world, is a serious, but rewarding undertaking. Many of us have already gone out to tender, or will be forced to do so in the next few months.
One of the strongest selling points that ALS continues to have, is the strength and depth of their user group communities. We are all poetic, lyric, and substantive contributors, hard at work on the continued success of this product in a global user environment. The alternatives (going to tender, migrating to another vendor) versus working with ALS, as many of us have already discovered, are expensive, time-consuming, and exhausting.
It is with this in mind that I would encourage you to provide positive and productive support of our vendor of choice, ALS. I welcome your participation as active players in a lyrical and global user group that we enjoy here today with one another.
We look forward to the new "horizon", we await the sunrise eagerly...
It is a wonderful experience for me to meet all of you in person after many years of virtual correspondence with you. On behalf of the CODI Board and the US user group, thank you for allowing me to speak to you this morning.
References
Cahill, James, The Lyric Journey : Poetic Painting in China and Japan, Harvard University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-674-53970-2
National Geographic Explorer, Montserrat, c1997, National Geographic Society
Zhang, Kaiping. Personal comments. Axe Library, Pittsburg State University, KS, 1998.
Send comments to: suzyq@pittstate.edu
Susan M. Johns-Smith
Axe Library
Pittsburg State University
1605 South Joplin Street
Pittsburg, KS 66762
Phone: 620-235-4115
This page last updated Monday, 28-Oct-2002 15:58:26 CST