PP290-4 (3) Special Topics:
Information Technologyand Public Policy
Fall 2011
Tuesday, Thursday | 5:00-6:30PM |Room 105
Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley
Instructors: Prof. Michael O’Hare and Jason Christopher, Dir. of IT, GSPP
Technology pervades our personal and professional lives. Our students need to be IT literate (GSPP Program Review)
Policy problems are increasingly addressed with IT tools (Experiments of Concern Portal)
Adoption of a new technology or information system will have anticipated and unanticipated implications… (Stanford, UCB)
Learning IT skills will develop your IT conceptual literacy. Our philosophy is that in learning real IT skills, you will gain an invaluable IT literacy that will inform your public policy thought and decision making.
PREMISES
Technology Pervades: Climbing Mt. Everest this Summer? Don’t Forget your Cell Phone.
Pasi Koistinen, chief executive officer of Ncell, Nepal’s first private telecom company speaks on a cell phone at an Everest base camp
First 3G (Third Generation) cell phone call from the
summit of Mt. Everest on 6 May 2011.
Technology pervades our personal and professional lives. Our students need to be IT literate (GSPP Program Review)
Policy problems are increasingly addressed with IT tools (Ex. Biosecurity: Experiments of Concern Portal)
Adoption of a new technology or information system may have anticipated and unanticipated implications…(Stanford, UCB)
Learning IT skills will develop your IT conceptual literacy. Our philosophy is that in learning real IT skills, you will gain an invaluable IT literacy that will inform your public policy thought and decision making.
PREMISES
IT TOOLS FOR POLICY
Technology pervades our personal and professional lives. Our students need to be IT literate (GSPP Program Review)
Policy problems are increasingly addressed with IT tools (Experiments of Concern Portal)
Adoption of a new technology or information system will have anticipated and unanticipated implications…(Stanford, UCB)
Learning IT skills will develop your IT conceptual literacy. Our philosophy is that in learning real IT skills, you will gain an invaluable IT literacy that will inform your public policy thought and decision making.
PREMISES
Adoption of a new technology at Stanford…“Sometimes I look and wonder if this wave of ERP (enterprise resource planning) software…wasn’t a collective hallucination,” Stanford CIO Chris Handley
“By the time Handley was hired to oversee the Oracle and PeopleSoft projects, Stanford had decided to change itself rather than the software. This meant relinquishing forever the convenience of technically superior mainframe software.”
• “Version upgrade gridlock” caused by interfering software Oracle v Peoplesoft
• Techs supporting the software w/o enhancing the codehttp://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Projects-Management/Stanford-University-Hard-Lesson/
UC Berkeley Calendaring and E-mail• E-mail: 4 million offered/day, 1 million
served• Calendar System: CalAgenda, a
PeopleSoft product• PeopleSoft bought by Oracle• But Oracle already has a calendar system• No plans to further develop PeopleSoft
calendar• UC looks to open source (OS)
development – Rensselear Polytechnical • Project flounders for lack of high level
staffing• UC system flounders• Lead tech for CalAgenda migration leaves
for Twitter• UCB looks to Google and Microsoft for a
soltion• Google won’t make guarantees about not
hosting e-mail in China….Hello Microsoft?
Technology pervades our personal and professional lives. Our students need to be IT literate (GSPP Program Review)
Policy problems are increasingly addressed with IT tools (Experiments of Concern Portal)
Adoption of a new technology or information system may have anticipated and unanticipated implications…(Stanford, UCB)
Learning IT skills will help you develop an IT conceptual literacy. Our philosophy is that in learning real IT skills, you will gain an invaluable IT literacy that will inform your public policy thought and decision making.
PREMISES
?What is your experience?
Student Introductions
HOW
Tuesday Sessions (Conceptual) Primarily discussion based on readings and in-class
presentation, see syllabus, find readings and links on bSpace, required and recommended material.
Thursday Sessions (Skills) “Lab” session, project-oriented, experimental, what can you
make the technology do? Hands-on, demonstrations of applications and technologies,
students sign-ups next Tuesday First demo: google docs (Jason) First project: HTML-based, create a personal web page… http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/
TOPICS Internet Filtering and
Tracking
Personal Hardware: Desktops and Laptops
Internet and the Web
Property and Digital Goods
The Ubiquitous World of Data
IT as a Management Tool
Content Management Systems
IT Applications and Tools
Collaborative Tools
HTML, python, Access, Plone and more…
Writing IT Functional Specifications
TOOLS
Clickers
Notes• A shared google doc document for each
session
Whiteboard• A shared google doc “drawing” for each
session
What else?
GOALS OF THE CLASS Learn IT skills, add to your policy toolkit (HTML markup,
a bit of python, collaboration tools, apps…) Learn IT concepts, converse constructively with IT
developers to build, rebuild or migrate Become familiar with the marketplace of IT systems, their
pros and cons, features and flaws, especially content management systems (CMS) (Compare and contrast systems)
Learn about Managing IT Resources, write a functional specification for an IT/Policy project
More…
ADMINISTRATIVE
Pre-requisites: None Always bring your laptop Grades:
25% Class Participation 25% Quizzes (frequent), interim group or
individual projects 25% Mid-term exam 25% Final group project
ADMINISTRATIVE
bSpace for: Web-based syllabus Revised detailed scope and Word-based
syllabus… E-mail archive Readings Announcements
Our course e-mail address: [email protected]
FINAL NOTE
“Could you make the blue more blue?”…