Administration

Greg updated his job description based on our discussion before Christmas, and I went through it again. I didn't find anything substantial to comment on, so I think Greg's ready to submit it to Scott and Peter for their comment.

Clifton is doing a practicum early this term, so wants to concentrate his hours later in the term. That's ok with me, but I wrote to the payroll (sorry HRIS) people to confirm that would be ok with them.

Archive Project Update:

Goal: Remove outdated audio/video/textbooks/manuals etc. from HCMC Archive by June 2007.

Progress: Shipment #1 (temporarily stored in HCMC workshop)is ready for sending to individual Language Depts.; administrative memo advising Depts. materials are coming is in progress.

Shipment #2: In progress in Archive Room;additional assistance has been requested recently in order to move this project forward and have it completed by June 2007.

Jan. 8/07: Todate-over 72 boxes prepared for shipping out.

Note: hrs. spent in 2006 approximately _________

Backed up all the sql databases to my Mac. Went through directories on my mac and moved projects from active folders to archive folders, cleaned up etc. Backed up all the data files on my mac to a DVD, with exception of raw video input files for FrancoToile. Backed up all data files on my mac to Yukon

Greg is about 90% done his job description, so I reviewed it with him to make sure the content was accurate, the overall impression reflected the reality, the level of detail and emphasis in examples was appropriate etc.

In the light of our discussions with the Dean recently, Stewart, Greg and I talked for about an hour about the future role of the HCMC, how we feel our role should change, and what we think about the possibility of an increased teaching role for HCMC.

As planned out in a previous post, the new blog has been created and I've made the first move by posting my current vacation days and CTO hours owed (28 days and 43 hours respectively).

Made number of text changes to planning page on hcmc site, including some based on casual conversation with Andrew Rippin who wanted a bit more detail on the criteria we use in judging which proposals are accepted and how they're scheduled.

Yesterday, I suggested that we use blogs to track our CTO. Greg proposed that we should actually use the Minutes Worked field to track CTO. This looked promising till we did some research into it. There are two objections:

1. The Minutes Worked field is an unsigned integer, so it can't handle negative amounts. That's probably not a major problem.
2. We'd end up with confusing numbers for the Minutes Worked. Imagine this:
   • I work 180 minutes on Project X.
   • 60 minutes of it is CTO.
   • I post 180 minutes in the Project X blog (I have to do this because otherwise the time worked on Project X is incorrect).
   • I post 60 minutes in the CTO blog (I have to do this so that there's 60 minutes of CTO for me on that day).
   • If you do a stats readout on me for that day, it now looks as though I worked 240 minutes, because the CTO minutes are posted in two blogs.

For those reasons, Stew and I feel that a simpler approach such as that outlined below is better, at least for the moment. We can also extend it to cover vacation time, like this:

• We create a blog called "Vacation/CTO".
• We create two categories in the blog, CTO and Vacation.
• I post my CTO as outlined below (post header: "CTO + 1 hour = 43 hours"; post body: explanation of why I had to do it).
• I post my vacation in the same way (post header: "Jan 5 to 9: vacation; 30-4=26 vacation days remaining".

It will be easy to recover anyone's current status in CTO and vacation, or to look at their history. This is WAY better than the current system, where we keep personal, private records of our CTO and vacation, because it makes us open and accountable, and makes it easy for anyone to see our status and history.

If we don't get any serious objections to this, I'll go ahead and create it at the end of today, and then we can all enter our current status into it before year-end, ready to use the system properly starting in January.

Dave Wolowicz presented on a centralized UVic blog service. Right now he's got a proposal approved. Next he has to create a plan. Idea would be to allow just about anybody with a netlink ID to create a blog (or more than one). Concerns include: - default capabilities to provide blog owners and mechanism for altering those capabilities on request - ability to mask identity of poster/commenter from other posters, from the blog admin or to post or comment completely anonymously We may be able to provide input on our experience with b2evolution and represent interests of Humanities and Language users if necessary. Follow up conversation with Dave, Cory Schofield (whose the sysadmin contact working with Dave) and Mary Sanseverino on related issues of uvic providing permanent online presence and services for people even after they've left the institution.