Celebrating Veterans Day and Native American Heritage Month with Your Views

The UC IT blog team is happy it is November and celebrating a number of communities, including yours. November 11 is Veterans Day. The month also provides an opportunity to recognize Native American and Filipino heritage, not to mention our industry’s (higher education technology) annual conference, Educause 2022. In December, we will celebrate several winter holidays and Universal Human Rights Month, among others. If we are missing topics important to you, please let us know.

The UC Tech community hopes to learn more about people with experiences both like – and different from – their own. To that end, we hope those mentioned above share your insights so we can learn more about you and your views. To participate, please email us: UCITblog@ucop.edu.

Please share with us in the coming days/weeks:

• Your identity: For example, if you identify as a veteran, Native American or Filipino-American, and/or if you had the opportunity to gain insights from the Educause 2022 Conference.
• Your current title/role, the name of your department and your UC location
• A photo of yourself – either casual or a formal headshot
• Can we publish the above in our blog?

Also, feel free to add:

• A few words about what you find most meaningful about your work
• Background on you. For example, if you are a veteran, which branch did you serve in, for how long, and where were you deployed? If you have Native American or Filipino roots, we would be happy to know more about it. How many generations has your family lived where you do? Where did they come from and/or move to? Are there traditions that are meaningful to you that we might share? How is your identity meaningful to you in the context of your work, etc?
• Are there any UC events or news sources (i.e. The Educause 2022 Conference) that you suggest we share with the UC IT community that relate to your identity and/or work topics of interest to you?
• Can we publish any of the above in our blog?

We would be happy to use the above to create about you for our blog, if you agree to that. As always, please provide any feedback/ideas you have for the UC IT blog:

• Email UCITblog@ucop.edu

About the Blog and Your Impact

What Happened Last Month?

Each month, since the blog began in 2015, we review feedback from the month prior and celebrate readers and the growing list of influencers/contributors who send content or discuss supporting the UC IT community via the blog, our social channels, etc. Check out our impact, below, and send us your insights. We welcome all who care to join us in shaping the UC IT blog in 2023 and beyond. 

Compliments to the contributors from our readers last month

Just wanted to say – excellent content on the UC IT Blog emails

Andrey Nikolayev, Academic Technology Analyst in IT Services at UCLA, October 10, 2022

Kudos to the UC Davis team for a lot of great accessibility work featured in the UC IT blog last week. Go Ags!

Van Williams, Vice President, Information Technology, Chief Information Officer (CIO), University of California, October 13, 2022

That’s a great story…about the UC Library Services project — encapsulates key elements of change management & governance done in a way that works well in the UCs. I have forwarded it to several people already

Annelie Rugg, Director and Humanities Chief Information Officer (CIO), UCLA Humanities Technology, October 17, 2022

Shout-outs

1. Thank you, Amy Neeser, UC Berkeley and Kelly Rowland, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who are in the cover photo and shared the story behind it. Fall tech events you don’t want to miss – Cyber Security Awareness Month and more [September 23, 2022]
2. Thank you, UC Tech Awards Program – Larry L. Sautter Innovation in Information Technology – Silver Award Winners, “Transforming UC Library Services” team (aka SILS), including UC California Digital Library team member Lena Zentall, as well as Christine Barone with the Southern Regional Library Facility (SRLF) Key Elements of the Systemwide “Transforming UC Library Services” Success Story [October 12, 2022]
3. Thank you, Ahna Ligtenberg Heller and Joshua Hori at UC Davis and Jim Phillips at UC Santa Cruz. UC Davis During Oct ’22 Disability Employment Awareness Month [October 7, 2022]
4. Thank you, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (ANR) team members Pamela Kan-Rice and Hanif Houston UC ANR announces California Agricultural & Robotics Technology Forum [September 27, 2022]

Recent results

• Newsletter open rates are ~35-40%, with 1.3K reading each newsletter and a range of 200-1,000 reading each article. Stories can get picked up by others (i.e., UC Net), in which case visibility increases by 10X.
• September 2022 social media: Twitter impressions 1.8K/month; LinkedIn Group 547 post views. Social media activity generated by the community causes post readership to climb.
• Subscriber base growth: 13%+ vs June 2022, currently 3,412 subscribed in October.