When Every Client Is Also a Server Copyright 1994 CAUSE. From _CAUSE/EFFECT_ Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 1994. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: jrudy@CAUSE.colorado.edu CURRENT ISSUES WHEN EVERY CLIENT IS ALSO A SERVER by Jack McCredie ABSTRACT: How can the National Information Infrastructure be seen as a solution to the many problems facing colleges and universities, instead of as yet another potential resource drain? The answer will demand creative planning, a fresh look at the traditional models of campus organization and approaches to teaching and learning, as well as the creation of broad-based partnerships among the public and private sectors. The Information Superhighway, NREN, National Information Infrastructure (NII), and Internet--only a few years ago these concepts were the dreams of a relatively small cadre of computing enthusiasts. Now they are an integral part of the jargon of the popular press and, much more significantly, key components of the national education infrastructure. This article explores several important networking issues facing campus leaders now that the president and vice president of the United States, along with many political, business, and entertainment leaders throughout the world, routinely publicize their e-mail addresses and provide convenient electronic access to important policy and operational information about their organizations. Campus leaders must ensure that their academic and administrative planners understand and incorporate emerging worldwide networking and computing opportunities in their departmental and campuswide programs and vision statements. Therefore, the top priority for leaders of campus computing activities is to ensure that this topic is on, and remains on, the planning and action agendas of their institutions. Their second highest priority is to participate in the resulting discussions, to separate hype from reality, and to develop solutions that are both innovative and economically feasible for the particular campus objectives under discussion. With all the media coverage about the information "superhypeway," it is easy to oversell networking ideas and propose plans that are not economically sound. It is much more difficult to design realistic solutions that both fit within tight resource constraints and improve the information infrastructure of an institution. A list of the most pressing issues keeping your chancellor, president, or governing board awake at night probably includes items such as the quality of teaching and research programs; budget reductions; fundraising; faculty retention and recruiting; student access; management accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness; affirmative action; health, safety, and security; quality of student life; "town-gown" relations; interactions with regents, legislatures, and other governing bodies; and faculty governance. Our job is certainly not to add another item, "NII issues," to this formidable list, but rather to develop effective ways that information technology can contribute to solving these problems. The reality emerging from the phenomenal growth of the Internet is that every client system on the net can easily become an information server, and tens of thousands have already done so. This architecture of highly interactive interconnecting webs of information servers differs greatly from an alternative vision of the NII as hundreds of channels of television programmed to entertain millions of passive viewers and to entice them to buy things. Several architectures will surely coexist as the information infrastructure evolves. However, higher education must take an active role to ensure the continued existence of the freewheeling open exchanges that are an integral part of both the culture of the Internet and the vitality of our campuses. NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT OLD NETWORKING INFRASTRUCTURE ISSUES The rapid emergence of the NII modifies many of the classic networking problems that have challenged us for years. Regardless of what legislative programs appear from Washington, or which mega-mergers actually take place, local campus managers must solve the puzzles of completing their networks. They have the responsibilities of wiring buildings, designing network topologies, setting standards for local area networks and campus protocols, connecting campuses to the NII, and developing institutional policies for enhancing, funding, amortizing, and replacing the local networking infrastructure and the computing systems connected to it. Most of the costs of the NII will be paid by local institutions. How or whether to recharge end users for network connections, and which services to subsidize and which to recharge, are key policy decisions. For example, by the end of fiscal 94-95, the University of California, Berkeley will have more than 20,000 connections available on its campus network. Our state funding to operate this facility was based on its size at the end of fiscal 91-92, about 8,000 nodes. By comparison, there are approximately 16,500 telephone lines terminating on campus. All of the operational costs related to voice communications are recharged. In 1992 campus administrators made an important decision to encourage the growth of the data network by not charging for its use. Obviously this strategy was successful; the number of network nodes more than doubled in two years. However, with decreasing state funding, exponential growth of campus data communications, and shrinking federal support for the network backbone, we must reexamine how to fund the ongoing operation of this valuable resource. Using a rough estimate of about $500 to $1,000 per node for wiring infrastructure and $4,000 to $5,000 per node for each connected computer leads to an approximation of the capital investment in networked computers at Berkeley of more than $100 million (a number few campus managers have internalized). On most campuses, such investments are made at different times, by independent departments and colleges, and without much coordination. Campuses must develop integrated ways of financing the operation, evolution, trade-in, disposal, and replacement of these assets, even though they are controlled by independent departments. An important and growing challenge is to make these valuable assets readily available to our constituents when they are at home or traveling. Most members of a campus community are many miles from the campus at night and on weekends, and many on-campus servers are relevant to the needs of alumni. As more services become available, and as the network becomes an integral part of the fabric of the campus environment, the pressure to provide better and more convenient home access grows rapidly. Protocols such as SLIP and PPP enable home-based computers to be independent campus network nodes even though their connections are at lower speeds than on campus. The big problem, however, is providing adequate physical access for home users at reasonable costs. A modem and a data line from the phone company are much more expensive than an on-campus connection and provide only a fraction of the capacity. Even though we have hundreds of incoming data lines at Berkeley, we are unable to keep up with demand. To alleviate this problem, we have introduced a new cost recovery recharge service with guaranteed customer access via a restricted modem pool. This medium-term solution will give us time to work with network access providers in nearby communities to develop the innovative home-based network access services required by our thousands of constituents. As entrepreneurial Internet access companies develop in diverse geographical locations, many users may find them to be a convenient and economical way of using the NII as well as campus resources. We have an opportunity to work closely with organizations that are developing what may be called "urban area networks" (see Figure 1). Higher education helped develop the technology and many of the applications that became the Internet. We should play a similar leadership role in developing these new urban networks. [FIGURE 1 NOT AVAILABLE IN ASCII TEXT VERSION] Another key campus challenge is providing adequate local bandwidth as modes of usage change in response to exciting new ways of navigating the NII and accessing multimedia information. Traditional forms of e-mail are very efficient, particularly client/server varieties that deliver and send mail in batches to personal computers from mail servers. However, rapidly emerging technologies such as Gopher, innovative browsing clients for the World Wide Web, the MBONE, and CU-SeeMe are bringing color images, integrated text and pictures, sound, full motion video, and teleconferencing to users who for many years have been satisfied with simple textual files. Rapid adoption of these newer forms of NII usage is inevitable, and will certainly saturate the capacity of many of our currently installed campus networks. Every campus must develop either investment plans to expand its networking capacity, or procedures to control and limit the traffic that it will allow on its network. Which applications are the "nice to have" versus the "must have" core applications? Administrators will once again be caught in the no-win situation of trying to define "appropriate use" based on network capacity. Every institution needs to review its present computing use policy, and prepare for the inevitable. EVOLVING ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES Planning, financing, and implementing physical campus networks are complex and difficult tasks. However, important educational and organizational policy issues such as a redefinition of intellectual property, copyright, royalties, privacy, censorship, etc. are becoming even more difficult to solve because of the rapid growth in electronic information services. The technological possibilities presented by the NII have not yet been fully incorporated into new modes of learning for most students. We have not yet developed the pedagogical models, learning frameworks, and classroom infrastructures to enable faculty to use these capabilities routinely in their courses. For example, a panel reviewing instructional technology at Berkeley this spring stated: Using instructional technology effectively or creating new applications requires more support than the campus currently provides, in identifying and developing pedagogical models, in training graduate student instructors (GSIs), faculty, staff and students in how to use the array of technologies now available, and in helping faculty and GSIs rethink and adapt their teaching to new technological developments. Some existing units are effective in this dimension for some specialized needs, but their size and coverage are not adequate.[1] Another recent report explored the potentials for educational improvement and the difficulties of expanding the use of distance learning throughout the University of California.[2] These observations are certainly not unique to Berkeley or the UC System. Neither are they meant to imply that we do not have many outstanding exemplars of the values of using networked electronic information in learning environments. The point is simply that in a world where a great deal of teaching continues in the same way that it is has for hundreds of years, there is much work to do to exploit the electronic opportunities before us. New campus information servers of all descriptions appear on our network every week. Often a campus computing organization does not even know about new servers, many of which are operated by students. Some of these servers acquire world- wide reputations for the quality of their information offerings, or the creativity of their presentations. An example is the Berkeley Paleontology Museum's server, which recently won a "Best of the Net" award from the Global Network Navigator for its artistically conceived "museum without walls." Because of the Internet, all of these servers are available to people throughout the world. More importantly, thousands of servers on the net are available to all of our students, faculty, and staff. Such online capabilities are transforming the ways individuals, departments, and businesses accomplish their work. For example, individuals searched the Berkeley online schedule of classes more than 175,000 times last August. Each week, there are approximately 750,000 queries from around the world of MELVYL, the University of California's integrated library information system. An interesting policy issue for campus administrators is to determine how the institution's resources and name, with implied support and liability concerns, may be used in these servers. For example, whose problem is it when a student develops an information resource in his/her dorm room, on a personally owned computer, and then uses campus facilities to make it available to the Internet with content that may violate copyright regulations, or even state or federal statutes? Training staff in the skills required to navigate in the electronic world is another major challenge carrying a large price tag. As more of our core administrative systems move online, staff at all levels need to acquire new skills that take them well beyond word processing and simple electronic mail. Many schools do not practice what they preach about the value of education and training for their own staffs. However, anyone who has tried to implement a complex online system knows that one of the key indicators of success is the adequacy of the training plan. Staff who understand the full range of networked information capabilities will be able to contribute greatly to reengineering processes in their institutions. They will press for, rather than resist, online course schedules and institutional catalogs; student and campus information kiosks; electronic disbursements and notifications of payments; experiments in distance learning; online registration systems; digital library and museum collections; integrated human resource systems; online financial systems; and dozens of additional innovations. Funding, cost-recovery, and recharge models will have a profound effect on the shape and the deployment of the NII, both on campus and throughout the nation. The Internet is certainly not free, but few understand how it is financed. Higher education needs to be in the middle of the debates about future subsidies, and how charges will be implemented. Free service for end users will become untenable for many applications. "Flat rate" charging will encourage experimentation and new applications; "per unit" charging will limit usage and growth but allocate fees directly on those who use the services. We need to define and develop pricing policies and strategies that fit the needs of higher education. As sellers of information services, every school should determine its place in the still undefined electronic marketplace. As providers, administrators must develop policies that will determine access privileges to the campus' expanding network and its electronic information databases. Who will have access, and will the pricing model be "fee for service" or "free access"? Will financial rewards for developers of these new products be based on institutional patent policies, book royalty models, or new concepts that have yet to be devised? As buyers, managers must determine which information resources to acquire, who should purchase them, and how they should be distributed over the network. They must ensure that copyrights will be protected, and they may need to develop recharge models to recover the subscription costs of these new resources. Who should make the appropriate tradeoffs among traditional book and journal acquisitions and electronic resources? New relationships will certainly emerge among campus libraries, computing organizations, printing departments, museums, university presses, business and law schools, computer science departments, and schools of public policy and journalism. Recognizing the value of working in the interfaces of these and other disciplines, and responding to the obvious challenges presented to all of society by the emerging capabilities and problems of a networked world, Berkeley recently decided to establish a new School of Information Management and Systems. The mission of this new school is to advance the understanding of the organization, management, and use of information and information technology, and the impact of information on individuals and institutions. To fulfill this mission, the School will have a technical component addressing the design of information systems and a social sciences component concerned with the needs of people who create and use organized information.[3] WHY THE NETWORK WILL NEVER BE FINISHED One of the questions I frequently encounter while making presentations about the roles of information technology on the Berkeley campus is, "When will the network be complete?" The standard answer remains the same as it was two years ago when I arrived on campus and asked our networking gurus that question: "Our network will never be finished because it evolves into something new as fast as we are able to build it; this creates new demands which spawn more growth." As new services continue to appear on the Internet, we will constantly be expected to provide better, easier to use, more universal, and higher capacity capabilities. Our institutions will also be faced with an increasingly broad array of related policy questions to solve. Higher education continues to play a major role in the development of the Internet and its information services. By developing innovative uses of this technology and by forming new partnerships with schools, municipalities, government agencies, and the private sector, we can build on this foundation to ensure that education and research remain at the core of the evolving global information infrastructure. By planning carefully and daring to imagine what applications our constituents will demand in five, ten, and fifteen years, we can not only move our campuses rapidly toward tomorrow's networked reality, but help to define and create it ************************************************************* SIDEBAR TWENTY QUESTIONS FOR EVERY CAMPUS 1. Are the realities of the emerging networked global information infrastructure adequately incorporated in your institution's planning process? 2. What are your competitors planning to do, and do you even know who your competitors will be as the NII evolves? 3. How is your IT organization partnering with other departments to develop network-based solutions to the most important problems facing your campus? 4. Are your campus leaders participating in the national and statewide discussions that will shape the roles of education and research in the NII? 5. Does your campus have a funding model that will enable the campus network to grow and to meet the exploding capacity requirements of new multimedia services? 6. Do you have a campus plan for amortizing and replacing your network infrastructure as well as the departmental and personal computers connected to it? 7. How are you making the networked services your constituents depend on available to them in their homes and while they are traveling? 8. How are you assisting faculty members to incorporate electronic resources in their courses and research? 9. What policies do you have regarding the use of your institution's name and networking infrastructure to make private or departmental electronic resources available to the world over the Internet? 10. How is your library involved in the decisions and operations of the campus network; are responsibilities clearly defined? 11. What pricing model are you using to make commercial electronic resources available to your campus? 12. How do you decide which collections and what institutional information to make available over the Internet? 13. What charging model is appropriate as users throughout the world access your resources? 14. How are you educating the staff of your institution in the skills required to navigate in the electronic world? 15. Are you leveraging the research programs of your faculty to help you move in innovative directions with your campus network? 16. How are you using your electronic resources to explore potential new partnerships with your municipality, K-12 education leaders, and businesses in your area? 17. How are your relationships changing with your regional access networks? 18. Do you understand the funding implications of the Federal government's decreasing support for the education and research network backbone? 19. Can you define and then identify inappropriate uses of the network; what corrective actions can you take? 20. Is your computer-use policy adequate to handle the demands of the many new questions that will arise when every client is also a server? ============================================================= Footnotes: 1 _Instructional Technology at the University of California, Berkeley_, Final Report of a Panel Chartered by the Academic Planning Board, University of California, Berkeley, April 1994. This document is available from the CAUSE Information Resources Library (CSD-0933). To order: phone 303-939-0310 or e-mail orders@cause.colorado.edu 2 _Report of the Task Force on Intercampus Programs and Distance Learning_, University of California, February 1994. 3 _Report of the Information Planning Committee_, University of California, Berkeley, December 1993. ************************************************************ Jack McCredie is Associate Vice Chancellor, Information Systems and Technology, at the University of California, Berkeley, where his charter is to help the university and all its departments achieve their goals more effectively by using the full range of communications and computing technologies in innovative and cost-effective ways. He serves on the Chancellor's senior staff, the Academic Planning Board, the Vice Chancellor's Administrative Council, and several other campuswide management committees. ************************************************************ When Every Client Is Also a Server 2$DNu"/ /A 2|N`LA cem9443.txtTEXTMSWDTEXTMSWD aZqBAd&4NuUO//Ho?< 0Nuproc@D d NVH,.&n ~I`f ` +Ќ(@ RepLN^NuNVU Jeff Hansen2c2STR r<