UCCSC 2002 Evaluation Results

Thank you for taking the time to let us know what you think!

• Jack M's presentation re needing an e-strategy (not just a portal).
• Active Directory from UCSD; Webcasting from Berkeley
• Wired for Wireless at UC Riverside
• labs without walls; centralized active directory
• Copyright Issues by Robin Gross of EFF
• CalNet; ColdFusion (Robert Johnson)
• J2EE
• e-Berkeley; CDL
• Active Directory - UCSD
• Ruzena Bajscy's CITRIS presentation; Electronic Cultural Atlas
• Computer Labs Without Walls: Laptop Checkout Program for UCLA Students - Lisa Kemp-Jones (UCLA)
• Webcasting Courses and Special Events at Berkeley
• Security Post 9/11, due to the candor of the presenter.
• My own, of course. :-) Seriously, I quite enjoyed Daniel Greenstein's closing keynote the most.
• tie between A Multi-Application Web Security Framework: A Modular Approach to Using CalNet and ColdFusion for Authentication and Authorization and Centralized Active Directory in a Decentralized Environment
• Jack McCreedie's
• I thought the presentation Sink or Swim - Transitioning to OS X was really well done. Also thought the BOF Session "Apple's Next OS Release, Code Name Jaguar" was very good as well.
• OS X Administration
• UCLA laptop checkout program
• EFF was fantastic I'm interested in this topic.
• Digital Library
• Dan Greenstein's talk on digital libraries.
• BOF session by Jerry Berkman of UCB on Web security
• Intro to UCI's EEE
• J2EE Lessons Learned (Tu 8:30, Track 1)
• EFF was short but informative.
• Airbears: Wireless LAN Project at UCB
• An Introduction to UCI's Electronic Educational Environment. Eric Carter and Briandy Walden (UCI)
• How to secure your web server by Jerry ? (UCB) BOF session
• Jack McCredie's plenary session
• Wirless for Riverside
• Jack McCredie, but the BOF on web security was also very helpful
• UCLA Labs Without Walls
• Web security by Jerry Berkman
• Keynote address by Ruzena Bejcsy
• UC Riverside
• Overview of UCB IT Governance and Bashears' Interoperatibility.
• Webcasing; I am very impressed with the way presented by the team members; especially the rapport shown within the team.
• UCSD presentation on ActiveDirectory implementation
• Mac OS X: Preview to Jaguar, and the Security workshop
• Security and Janettee's project.
• CalNet for Authentificaton; Wireless Paperless Payment Process
• Active Directory in a Distributed Environment
• Active Directory - UCSD
• Web Security BOF (Jerry Berkman - UCB)
• very few
• The Webcasting presentation and Jerry Berkman's web security tutorial. I also liked the UCSD Active Directory presentation.
• UC Davis - Media Cabinets
• Web Security, ECAI, Paperless Payment
• Crys Harris & Eric Strahm - Active Directory; Web Security Best Practices - Jerry Berkman; Jon Ober also good.
• EFF - It's the one workshop that could have been longer.
• ECAI
• Jack McCredie enterprise e-strategy
• Active Directory - UCSD
• The EFF DMCA talk was interesting, but the webcasting talk was the most intriguing.
• Mac OS BOF w/ Apple presenters
• Informative: OS X sink or swim; Interesting: EFF presentation
• Ruzena Bajscy & CITRIS. She was interesting, humorous, topical and was a great kick-off. Overll -- people need to not read their PowerPoint presentations - and just talk to us! Other good presentations: Research e-Protocol, best live demo! (even with the problems) and best representation of technical & administrative sides of the house working together. Also good -- FAPSI presentation and LHS J2EE!
• J2EE
• Track 1 e-Berkeley
• 1) Multi Application Web Security, Robert Johnson. 2) Ruzena Bajscy. 3) EFF
• Mac OS X - Sink or Swim
• Jack McCredie enterprise e-strategy
• UCI's EEE
• Web Applications Security Tutorial (Jerry Berkman). Do it again at Micronet!
• Technical Interoperability of the Berkeley Open Learning Environment (B-OLE)
• OS X
• e-Berkeley
• Merced update ;-)
• Several dealing w/security, cold fusion, and web applications
• Upgrading to OSX
• A Multi-Application Web Security Framework
• No stand-outs
• I thought all the presentations were very well presented, very interesting and informative. I especially found the CITRIS presentation, by Ruzena, interesting and informative.
• Sink or Swim
• Wireless
• Sink or Swim - Mac OSX
• Jack McCredie
• e-Berkeley
• Imaging Capture -- workflow
• OS X
• Jack McCredie; Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative
• Unfortunately, I didn't find any useful for my area.
• Robin Gross, EFF
• IU (Yee) was really interesting
• CITRIX
• The RePs - research protocol system, especially the interactive web component & the role definitions

• Reassess the core focus of the conference presentations. I thought the sessions were interesting, but the topics/tracks were so broad that the opportunity to cover common UC computing support issues in depth was somewhat missed.
• If the conferences continue to have a Sunday night event, perhaps more could be made out of it. Perhaps a speaker and some sort of presentation to introduce the conference theme and what's going to be happening. As they are, Sunday nights are ok, but people sort of float in and out to eat and it felt a little aimless. The posters are a good idea, maybe more of a formal introduction of those working at the poster "booths" and what they have to offer ... I regret that UCLA didn't have a presentation! :(
• Hot tubs and massage therapists. Loved the raffle!
• Excellent food Sunday. Monday: needed lower decibel seating to have places to sit & share info. Try to have each room able to hold 50 % of registration to avoid so many standing in halls.
• Free parking; invite more vendors to attend; some meeting rooms are too small; Laura Kim is incredible! Thanks laura and her friendly team! Good job!
• Poor facilities. Hearing speakers difficult in BOF sessions In Chevron; chairs too close together (rows) everywhere -- I have long legs. Need comparison of campus infrastructures so we can put speakers experiences in perspective.
• *Larger meeting rooms! Maybe ask during registration which topics/sessions are of interest to get an approximate number of attendees to each session to reserve appropriate size room? *Forks and serving utensils for dinner reception -- or warn guests beforehand so they can bring their own... *More prizes for the raffle.
• Continue the informal, collaborative nature of the conference, while continuing to invite technical speakers with a broad perspective.
• Better seating capacity for track sessions. There was not enough room for many sessions (standing room). Make track sessions the same amount of time so it is easier to jump tracks and attend different themed sessions.
• Ensure the conference location has presentation rooms of sufficient size so that people aren't required to stand in the hallway/entrance to the room. Some of us may be interested in multiple topics being presented at the same time, and may want to move between rooms during presentations to catch parts of different presentations. Good food at meals, a variety of snacks at breaks, and comfortable seating with leg room can keep the conference attendees happy. :) The seating this year was not that comfortable, in my opinion. P.S. Having a wireless LAN this year was very useful.
• Think that the wireless coverage problems became a distraction. Setting up an additional AP in the auditorium itself (in addition to the foyer) might have resolved some of the problems. Also, the Robert and Ida Sproul rooms were always jam packed and seemed a little small for the conferences. Large rooms for future UCB hostings might be appreciated.
• Consider a section of 5 minute "lightning" talks which allows a lot of people to speak about what they are doing while not boring the audience. People have opportunities to follow up with speakers who intrigue them.
• Suggestion: Have a short list of selected "hot topics" and ask/force each campus to give a minimum of one talk on a topic selected from the hotlist. this will give the conference even more focus, and force more campuses to be involved.
• Encourage more panel sessions at which campuses review current progress on similar projects.
• Better parking and housing arrangements. The concert on Sunday displaced many out-of-town visitors (including myself) and had to find parking several blocks away from Stern Hall. Stern Hall didn't seem ready to receive visitors as well. Had to drive around to look for entrance to the residence hall and when it was found it was hard to get to since the gate to it was closed on Sunday. Had to call someone from the residence hall to open the gate so that I could drop off my bags before I went out to look for parking several blocks away.
• Have more drinks and heartier food available.
• Projectors farther away from screen, lower lighting, more room in front for speakers, parking finally worked out OK.. A BIG thank you to Lisa and all the others.
• More options for hotel (non-dorm) accommodations.
• Larger rooms for all of the talks. There was quite a bit of overflow in the upper rooms.
• Synchronize the 30-minute and 60-minute sessions; this year, if you wanted to go to a 30-minute session, you only had one option for the other 30 minutes in the one-hour time block. If all the 30-minute sessions were at the same time, you could mix and match better.
• More technical sessions -- shorter keynote/endnote speakers.
• Pagers and cell phones OFF or in quiet mode during presentations! More to do on Sunday. All presentations on CD or available for download after conference. Session content seemed to be "institutional". Would be nice to have more of "this is how I solved this problem" kinda thing -- something that the department manager and technical staff (a majority of campus IT staff) could participate in.
• Less time at Plenary sessions, to allow attendance at more presentations (I wanted to go to overlapping sessions ... I know it's impossible to make this work perfectly for everyone -- I think you guys did just about as well as one could).
• add job title on name tag to help facilitate networking.
• Besides more red tickets?.....Don't color code the name tags per campus. "What campus are you from?" is a good ice-breaker and has the added benefit of annoying some people.....
• When there is a combination of 30 and 60-minute sessions, make sure they are timed with other simultaneous sessions so that an attendee may switch after 30 minutes to a talk in another location.
• Make the presentations more interactive. A lot of the speakers were very dry and boring. Were a couple was real good and got a lot of feedback and involvement from the people there.
• More topics on Helpdesks
• Prioritize interesting speakers over their political clout. The Ruzena Bacscy presentation was poor.
• Heartier fare at mealtimes!!!
• Better breakfast, I gained weight from eating those muffins. Maybe breakfast coupons to the local food places, to be used between certain breakfast hours only. Lunch was great tasting, light and healthy. The Salmon lunch was perfect.
• Don't start the sessions at 8:00. It's too early!
• None, it was great.
• Make it more collaborative. Sitting passively listening to lectures, waiting until it is your turn to be allowed a question is not the most engaging or memorable way of learning and exchanging information. It would be more helpful to have the opportunity to actually talk to groups of people who are involved in the same types of work as I am and exchange ideas, rather than just listening to project descriptions or hoping to luck out and meet some people at the reception.
• More substance, less showcase.
• Provide coffee during the entire conferences
• Better access to wireless, larger rooms.
• Keep the minimum presentation time to 45 mins. Allow 1.5 hour blocks. Allow 30 minute mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks. Add an information or technical rating to presentations, ie. Introductory or advanced.
• Do not overlap session - group a section with only 30 min sections - do not combine 30 & 60 minute sessions during same time frame.
• Please encourage all presenters to use actual examples* in their presentations on technical topics, not just PowerPoint slides. *examples = functioning web pages/sites, code snippets, etc.
• The rooms for many of the sessions were too small; people had to stand. Another suggestion: The poster session format was not particularly effective because there weren't always representatives from the campuses responsible near the posters.
• Convenient, coordinated PARKING! Too long a trek from reserved lot to conference site Mon. & Tues.; res. Hall parking confusing as to cost. UCLA's was much better. (Yes, I realize the city of Berkeley is parking-challenged.)
• Let the speakers know it's okay to have fun while they're speaking.
• I would like to see the information presented on the posters on the WEB. Then we could review them online & share them with our staff.
• The IT executive talk, (this year, CITRIS) - An hour of our time is worth, conservatively, $150, 000. Please require speaker to speak to us - and not deliver a canned talk good for donors, faculty, or chamber of commerce groups. My question will always be - how is this going to affect our jobs.
• 1) Make sure the rooms for breakout sessions are big enough. This year's were consistently too small -- participants were turned away and for those who stayed it was often hard to see and hear. 2) Extend the conference till 5 pm for more breakout sessions.
• Latte's. More & bigger meeting rooms. Livelier keynote speaker.
• The overall idea of 30 minute presentations was fine but having them interspersed with longer presentations did not work well. This made it difficult to get to all the sessions I wanted. Monitor size of classes and be prepared to move them quickly if too full or start out with rooms that are bigger than needed. Some classes had people standing out in the hall who could barely hear.
• Make sure there is network access in the dorms if dorm housing is offered.
• Large enough breakout rooms. Prefer campus oral reports to posters.
• More sessions on supporting end users (windows XP, OS X) and departmental servers (.net, OSX server, etc.). Too much related only to centralized services and was not applicable to those who work in campus departments and directly supprt end users. Sessions that did relate (such as Active Directory) were so packed that it was hard to get in.
• Individual campus meetings every year (ex: We need to communicate more here at Berkeley on computing services issues!) and then - every four years (like the world cup!) have all the campuses get together to exchange information! Thanks for all your hard work to put this event on -- I really appreciated it.
• more toys. Sushi? Zach's.
• Improve the quality of the poster session.
• Check residence hall housing in advance and give a candid description of quality. My room in Stern had oder problems. Heard the same thing from others. Separate BOFs so participants can speak up and be heard without disturbing other BOFs. You did an outstanding job. Very well organized, very enjoyable. Thank you! -Rick
• Meeting rooms were too small. Many sessions in the Sproul rooms were standing room only.
• Have water (bottles) available at all times.
• Reduce single threaded sessions -- more breakfast time. Have Welcome, Intro, & keynote for all, then go to breakfast sessions 10:30 am Monday. UCOP reports are too vague to be of use & I'm not interested in Digital Library -- why is it single threaded?
• Provide conference shutlle/transportation services for getting to and from airports & from various locations at various times, e.g., in the morning before breakfast is served & at the end of the day before/after the evening reception, especially since alcohol is being served. Pre-conference sign-ups for sessions to ensure adequate seating for popular topics.
• Rooms too small for presentations. Food: Mon lunch = 3 salads. Mon dinner = mostly meat. Mix it up a bit.
• Larger rooms for presentations. All the sessions I attended in Ida Sproul and Robert Sproul were packed, standing room only. All the sessions in Chevron auditorium & Homeroom were sparsely attended. I missed several sessions I wanted to attend due to this.
• Make name on Badges larger, include campus & school/dept affiliation on badge.
• The poster would have worked better if they had included contact information. The best aspect to the old campus update format was "we're working on X at UCZ. Person Y is the one you want to talk to if you're also concerned with X."
• Verify all connections -- frankly, since the internet connection did not work during my presentation, I was extremely disappointed. The FASDI site is IP locked & for all non-UC campuses this would have been the only opportunity to actively see the site. So for my presentation, I consider it a bust.
• It's nice to hear about major computing projects, but desktop/network issues are more useful on an individual CSC level. The campus reports are missed, and are a good format for reporting major projects.
• Try to keep presentations in same time slots across tracks to avoid having to leave a session early to attend session in another track.
• -- Food service: make sure there is ice water, plenty of napkins, and utensils to eat with! When did hors d'oeuvre food equate to "dinner"? When did tortellini become a finger food? -- More convenient parking for guests - MLK Garage is way too far! -- Levity: be more loose, add humor, and be more enthusiastic when presenting reports. Take example from jack McCredie - he made an otherwise dull talk fun. - "Rah. rah, ha, ha." Let's have some fun. -- Define what a "poster session" is to the general attendee. Nowhere in the program before the conference explained to me what it was for. -- Thank you for the food and flowers free-for-all after Monday's reception!'
• I like the idea of 30 minute sessions. This allows more topics to be presented during the conference.
• The conference was executed well.
• Rooms too crowded, I missed some sessions because the rooms were over capacity and people were gathered around the walls and outside the door in the halls. This was very disappointing.
• I like sit down meals where one is served as opposed to buffet style food, but that's just me - no offense.
• BOF with specific time slots
• Confusing to have mixed-length sessions. Make sure the technology being used is reliable. Networks broke down in presentations. Wireless was very unreliable in session rooms.
• More seminars on administration & technology. Administrators could use a technical boost to automate tasks, but often lack support and training to know what's out there.
• Excellent job of organization! Some great workshops -- very useful. Thank you!
• Include sessions for department level. I support an administrative department w/ no students or faculty (which may be a rare situation). The sessions this year seemed to be geared toward "top level" net-ops & "campus-wide" departments.
• -Having multiple BOF in one room to loud. -Some high appeal talks (Wireless) not large enough room. -multiple track set up meant it was hard to go to a wider variety of topics. -Chevron room: lots of background noise.'
• No overlapping sessions - move to 3 days.
• -House rooms giving presentations closer together. -One room was too crowded so I missed the presentation in that room (Ida Sproul). -Loved the food, thanks!'
• Very, very valuable
• Just a logistics idea: It would be better to have all presentations located in the same area. Mainly because people hop & try to get a little from all presentations. By having 3 upstairs and 1 downstairs meant the downstairs presentations appeared to be consistently under-attended.