Not Quite a Blog

Dave Schlossberg (now at IODA) has this piece, "The State of the iSchool: A response from an unarmed alum", over at his rant-space, the meat. I'll post some comments after reading it at lunch... more later.

Later: So, Dave's words aren't meant to be minced. It's truly tough love from a very smart former student who is trying to apply what he learned in the real world (and damn if IODA isn't a really good idea that he's struggling to make even better). Here are some rambles from me:

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The mission statement, for sure, is not as good as the old one. The old one was longer, had more cool stuff in it and I think did a better job of explaining our true mission. When it's hard to summarize what we do, it's not necessarily a good idea to do it in less words.

As for me liking the five areas of concentration, not so much. They seem like we had to shoehorn what we do into something, and the five areas idea was what that something ended up being. One funny thing is that if you watch the little flash intro to the new programs page (http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/programs) it actually lists six areas (it splits "information economics" and "information policy" into two areas instead of one). Hopefully, the five areas will help us in the long run to be more coherent about our curriculum offerings... although we might want to have a projection of the current schematic on to something that my parents (both smart physicians) could understand.

Dave's summary of the iSchool is great, and maybe our mission should be a versioned work or wiki-able by the faculty:

The goal of the UC Berkeley School of Information is to understand the nature of information in our society by combining the best practices of Computer Science, Business, Economics, Law, and Sociology. The result is an academic and professional program that educates the future leaders in technology development, management, and research -- leaders who can use their knowledge to drive the changes that will become part of our everyday lives.

I must say, though, I like the state of the school speech, in function. Anno is a very hands-on Dean and we were all excited to hear about what's happened and what's in the works. I was definitely more interested in what's going on rather than the raising money part of things, which still doesn't make sense to me other than being something passed on down from the UC administration or by comparing us to other iSchools. We need something more regular that keeps people abreast of what is going on in various projects and research groups... in Astronomy, we had journal club where you could come talk about your work or something new in your area and get feedback from most everyone.

Our faculty are spread rather thin. Most have joint appointments which means they're really only half a faculty member. And when we work with outside faculty, like my mentor Deirdre Mulligan, it can be quite difficult to tie back in or even answer simple questions like: "Under what circumstances can she sit on what committee?"

I'm not sure that the marketing effort did much. We have a new name and a new logo and a new meme. I guess we'll see; no one was expecting it to launch a rocket. I do think a wider swath of alumni input would have been more than justified (How were they sampled? Were they chosen to get feedback we wanted to hear?).

I definitely try to interact with Masters students when I have time. And we PhDorks are damn busy. As for the issue of the door, it's open now and I tend to leave it open and encourage people to actually walk through it. However, the PhD space is more of an office space and some PhDs do attempt to read here, have meetings and conference calls here (even with my cursing at some inexplicable shell script or PERL bug). We're moving the PhDs (I hope) to room two (where the visiting scholars now are) and that space has a room with a lockable door that could be used for fragile meetings and such. I really se no reason why there even needs to be a door between the two areas... I'll float taking it off of it's hinges and see what happens.

Loved Dave's ending:

SIMS students are the kind of people that...

• See problems before they happen. And when you ignore us and those problems happen, call us in to fix it and we'll make sure it doesn't happen again.
• Don't need to be told what to do. You should ask us what to do, and we'll tell you what we think. Then we'll make sure it gets done, let you know how it went, and tell you how to do it better next time.
• Put the pieces together. Is there some new technology or trend that you think fits into your business? We probably already saw that link, figured out how to integrate it, and even started working on it.
• Get it. You don't have to explain your problems twice, much less once. We speak business, technical, or social lingo. And if you don't get it -- trends, businesses, technologies -- we can explain it to you.

And above all, SIMS students are the kind of people that you want working for you. You don't want us working for your competitors because we know your business better than you do, and we'll put you out of business before you can say, "How do they keep beating us to the punch every time?"