Believing that infrastructure should move to the cloud to save money for the business is admitting that IT is a non-strategic cost center. Infrastructure should be moved to the cloud to focus IT resources, both human and financial, on strategic initiatives core to the business.
Category: Digital Transformation
Blog Moved to Domain of One’s Own
At Brigham Young University we are experimenting with and piloting a Domain of One’s Own experience for students, faculty, staff, courses, and who knows what other uses we’ll find. To experience this environment I have chosen to move some of my content to my new blog at kelly.flanagan.io with the associated site being hosted by Reclaim Hosting.
The main focus of this experiment is to educate, encourage, and facilitate students in taking control of their digital identity. Instead of placing their content on social media sites where others drive how their content is displayed, what security policies exist, and how long their content persists, we are hoping to give students a place they can call their own and control the way their content is shared with others of their choosing.
However, we also hope to use this environment to implement a personal API for each of our participants. Imagine that when a domain is created and hosted, a subdomain is also created, perhaps api.domain. This URL points to an application implementing an API for the individual. This personal API would have resources pertaining to the individual that would be created, retrieved, updated or deleted using appropriate HTTP methods. These resources would be protected by Oauth, or some other mechanism, allowing the individual the ability to protect their information from others while authorizing those they desire to access it.
In the end, perhaps this sort of architecture will result in institutions, like BYU, not having to hold onto individual personal information, but rather asking students, staff, faculty and others for permission to access the needed information from the individual’s personal API. This would allow individuals to control the use and spread of their information and reduces the amount of personal information the institution needs to protect; as a CIO, I really like that last bit!
There are others working in this area including Kin Lane, Jim Groom, Phil Windley, and others. If you want to participate, learn more, contribute or just listen in, please join us at the next University API and Domains (UAD) conference to be held again in early 2016.
Domain of One’s Own @ BYU
At Brigham Young University we’ve noticed the work at Mary Washington University on the Domain of One’s Own. I’ve been thinking for some time about providing each of our potential, matriculated and former students with a portfolio where they could deposit their application material before arriving, school work while here, and other contributions to society throughout their lives.
Students could then explicitly permit the institution to access and evaluate their work. They could permit potential employers to view samples of their work, and could interact with others through shared access, etc.
The MWU Domain of One’s Own initiative may be a great start at such a tool. I love their concept that in addition to a tool to facilitate student learning it also teaches students to take control of their own data and to stake out their own digital identity. In addition to learning traditional college disciplines, they learn to interact and communicate in the virtual online world.
We’re going to learn from these pioneers and bring the knowledge to the students at BYU. This should be an interesting and fun experience.
