 We should go ahead and get started. I'm Cliff Lynch. I'm the director of the coalition for networked information and I welcome you to the fourth and final day of week two of the CNI fall 2020 virtual member meeting week two just to remind you was themed around organizational and professional change and transformation. Note that, along with the, the presentations that we have been seeing the project briefings from the last few days and the ones that we'll have today. There are also some pre recorded videos that we've made available as part of this week's presentations and I'd invite you to enjoy those as well. We're doing a summing up session at four o'clock on the next Monday, trying to synthesize some of the main themes we've been hearing out of these presentations. A few mechanical things the session is being recorded and it will be made publicly available later. There is closed captioning available please make use of that if it's helpful. There is a chat box. You can use that to introduce yourself share information with other attendees, or make comments as the presentation goes. There's also a Q&A tool at the bottom of your screen and please feel free to pose questions as they occur to you during the presentation we will actually try and address all the questions at the end, after we've heard from both of our speakers in a question and answer session that will be presented by and golden Burkhardt of CNI. And I think that's all the logistical stuff I want to do so let me introduce the session and our speakers. We have two speakers with us today Lori Taylor and Todd Digby, both are from the University of Florida, and the session is at least as I understand it from the abstract, obviously we're all going to see the session. It's a little hard to describe it really, it really to me is about sort of cultural and organizational change, as well as how that plays out through technological work and technological practices. And it also has an element to me of taking sort of broad ideas, very much in the spirit of the, the generous thinking that Kathleen Fitzpatrick proposed to us in a recent plenary session, and actually moving them into the sort of day to day practices and culture of an organization. And I hope that that's more or less a good frame for this if it's not all, I look forward to learning why. And with that I'll just thank Todd and Lori for joining us and hand it over to Lori. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction and thanks so much for having us here today. Good afternoon and welcome to everyone. I'm Lori Taylor and I'm here with Todd Digby. And today we're speaking about compassionate computing, leveraging socio technical practices for technical and cultural change. In this presentation, we will start with by situating the perspective from the University of Florida and specifically from our new division library technology and digital strategies. Then we'll define compassionate computing as a philosophical approach and share examples of how we practice compassionate computing. We will also share related philosophies concepts and practices, including discussing justice both procedural and informational and the triangle of satisfaction, we will then conclude with a take home message. Our story, like all stories, has many beginnings and predict trajectories. Now, we have selected some of the core elements that have brought us to compassionate computing. Much of our work begins with digitization and libraries, and with the problems and promise that it enabled including forming new roles requiring new types of ongoing maintenance and sustainability for technologies and new digital projects and formats that required robust support project management and project portfolio management. Our digital story began with extremely intense pressure for preservation, and specifically began in collaboration with Caribbean, our Caribbean library collaboration state back to the founding of the university, because our libraries have always identified as being Caribbean libraries. When the Farmington plan started US stepped up for the Caribbean. The Farmington plan was the US plan for how to support access to all the world's materials by having different US institutions take responsibility for parts. The US work ranged widely. In the 1940s to the 1970s, you have regularly had library workers on boats and planes with microfilm cameras, microfilming materials. The promise was that each partner and you have would get a copy of the materials for preservation and access. To pass forward to the 1990s when you have started working in experimental digitization. Of course, the greatest need and impact are from Caribbean materials often only held at UF with so many materials lost to storms and other and tropical climate. By 1999 us experiments had grown to the founding of the digital library center, which formalized digital work. The work is complex and connects across many people within digital units and beyond. So additional supports for collaboration come into play. Also, you have continued to work on Caribbean materials. Thanks to the leadership from the University of the Virgin Islands, the digital library of the Caribbean or D lock comes into being. Its goal was to support preservation and access has done by and for the Caribbean. Its governance model and underlying principles of mutual aid and ethics of care continued to drive D lock forward and continue to spread ideas and ways of working across all partners, including from folks at UF. In the 2000s, we saw exciting new work that builds upon digitization. Next comes next. This included digital humanities digital scholarship radical collaboration, our official goal with research computing was radical collaboration, team science and more. All of this rich and wonderful work presents a lot of new needs libraries created the digital partnerships and strategies department to support the complexities of partnership building and technical and cultural change. The work in enabling equity throughout through process technological and cultural changes in January 2020 libraries at UF updated the organizational structure, bringing together two departments library technology services and digital library or digital partnerships and strategies into a new division library technology and digital strategies. The libraries established the new division because of the importance and pervasiveness of technology to departments had have interconnected work and the organizational change enabled increase effectiveness through change ways, changed ways of working. One of the most important changes has been the focus on what we have termed and passionate computing. We started to use the term compassionate computing to bring together known best practices, including from generous thinking and thank you, Kevin Fitzpatrick, and also from collaborative partnerships and technologies. These best practices include recognizing that all technologies are socio technical and must include policies practices people and communities who are using the technologies that for optimal work, we must consider how technologies will be used and maintained. And that complete confronting complexity requires compassion and grace, we need established rules practices and patterns to ensure consistent and equitable operations. Just as well, we must be able to radically change if needed. We know how we can do this, especially with us by drawing on our experience as Floridians and as Caribbean community numbers and how we respond to hurricanes collectively. By focusing on technical optimization and compassion, we can best support everyone, including our technology workers, and by structuring our work as compassionate computing, we can best support our current needs and our future planning. Further we envision compassionate computing in relation to responsiveness overall, including enabling resilient and resistant operations. As the pandemic required major and urgent changes, we use the concept of compassionate computing to focus our community to be able to rapidly pivot and develop new methods. So on this slide, we're sharing some of our shared values for our work, and the link goes to the full shared values document. As part of creating the new division, we had strategic planning retreat sessions over the summer, we're all fully remote. Together, you know, we developed our shared values. I'm hoping that these values resonate with everyone for what folks see just the sampling on the screen. Stating values as a necessary part of collaborative work so that we can begin from places of understanding for what our perspective is, and then how we also engage with others. We love the process of creating our shared values document, and we especially love our statement on empathy, which is, we work from a place of empathy for users, our systems and ourselves. Part of having that shared values and orients are situated perspective for how we engage with the world how we engage with our collaborators. And part of that is how do we enable satisfaction, how do we have procedural justice, how do we have informational justice and our engagement and communication with others. And we focus on and we shared this in our strategic planning retreat with our team, the triangle satisfaction, which depicts the three types of needs that need to be addressed in any negotiation. Satisfaction is based on emotion outcome and process. And our work as technologists. How often do we get to have folks be fully satisfied. We have philosophies and methods like agile and scrum project portfolio management acceptance criteria and more to support the process the results in the emotion. But even with these supports how often are stakeholders satisfied. And how about our technology workers. We hope that everyone has high levels of justice in their workplaces and high levels of satisfaction. We know that this is a lot of work to achieve. And at UF we're getting there. In the past, we had a major problem with our technical folks because of communication with other folks. So we needed to bridge that connection together. We needed better communication across groups who had not been productively connected in the past. To make the change we knew we needed to build empathy and compassion to be able to support problems as they arise and to deal with them collaboratively together as equals. So we started talking about compassionate computing as a way to bring folks closer together for a huge host of needs. Some of these are first ever web migration. We've got many web systems in use. We've never done a full completed web migration and new information architecture. So this is a huge lift for technical and cultural change. We're in the process of migrating our digital collection system. We're also in the process of implementing an archival finding aid system with archive space. And we're dealing with so many chicken and egg problems. How do we implement needed methods, practices and patterns for stabilizing our work for future growth when we're a wash and urgent and important work. We have lots of examples here obviously from the pandemic and remote work, but also from things from moving to from server space to using one drive for our different user files, changing how we handle live apps, rolling out programs, programmatic support for you off live domains which uses reclaimed hosting, little things that are also big things like active directed directory cleanup, upscaling workers in the tech units and more. For this host huge host of needs we're doing great on all of them which is really, really wonderful especially in 2020. And it's because we're using compassionate computing to bring our groups together across the libraries and a productive and generous manner. We're implementing compassionate computing as a way to change culture, we have our shared values and related practices, and here we have some guiding questions to take the abstract to the concrete. One simple example comes from our pandemic and remote work. Prior to the pandemic you have to not allow people to take equipment home. We had a workplace who needed to work from home. We had no methods and suddenly we had to do a lot do this at scale, pulling compassionate computing. We knew we had to fulfill our mission of supporting workers. That meant we had to support people and taking equipment home. We had to make it easy for them and easy for us to comply with requirements for tracking equipment. Within a day, we changed how we process equipment requests, we send people home with equipment, we expanded help desk hours and began home computing support. The image here is a wifi usb. Normally us would not buy equipment, if it was not seen as if it was seen as redundant. We had one five foot network cable from their desktop computers. Taking your office workstation home caused problems. You have a short network cable that people and their kids and dogs are tripping over with their dining room now being their home offices. We knew people needed options like wifi cards. We bought them where we could but supplies were short and things were back ordered. And we worked with fiscal units to support reimbursements when we couldn't order enough but individuals could find them on their own. By practicing compassionate computing, we had a smooth process for these and ton of other dramatic changes that we had that we do and how we work. One of these changes is how we support technology in an increased compassionate way. We also needed to focus on creating a staffing environment within the library technology services department that embrace these ideas and changes. Libraries that you have had have conducted the ARL climate call organizational climate and diversity assessment. Which is an assessment of library staff perceptions concerning libraries commitment principles of diversity organizational policy and procedures and staff attitudes. Libraries conducted this survey in 2014 and 2019. In 2014 the survey placed the library technology department well below the other departments and units across the library in many of the areas. Although the department saw significant increases in the 2019 results there were still improvements to be made. The area that we focused on was improve, improve departmental communication and information sharing, which resulted as Lori mentioned, in a series of strategic planning with beat meetings that were held in a remote fashion since we're all remote now. This activity helped foster an understanding of the various aspects of the work across the department, and also led to actionable changes in how we document and communicate our work, both within the department and across the libraries. I feel that this has led to an increased sense of ownership and pride in the work that is done. We've also engaged in taking the recently engaged in taking the everything disk assessment to build better understanding of what our personal workplace tendencies are, and how others may approach activities differently. I believe this is a key factor in our department's abilities to understand those that we support in partnership with so that we can keep building on our compassionate computing approach. Another way that we uplifted compassion as part of compassionate computing with a pandemic and the remove and the move to remote work. A key example is the practice and kindness and crisis series which was in partnership with the diversity equity inclusion librarian and the library press at UF. The series offers multiple ways for personnel to share what makes them a whole person. So we had a web series and it also had an online book that's in press books where we leverage technology to bring folks together with the web series in the online book to share stories as whole workers as whole people and to connect meaningfully with with technology. So we've used that for sharing different recipes and for sharing about gardening for having difficult discussions on structural racism. How do we bring together how do we deal with the with our world and how do we support each other when we're in the remote fashion. So looking at how we leverage technology to support compassion and support our community. So something that was really exciting about this series we had the first series with the first group and it successfully completed. Okay, this was a bridge to help everyone feel still more connected and feel more comfortable with how we use different digital technologies. Zoom was new for so many folks so how to do this in a fun and low consequences way if you forget if you forget to unmute yourself if there are other problems to bring people together as whole workers. And so the first show runner series for the practicing kindness felt that the work had been done. And so they closed the series. I, another group came along and said, Hey, we really want to do that we want to modify the format a little bit. But so now we have a new show runner and a new format. And so the technologies and frame that we're already in use we're enabling. And so now we're on to season two, which is covered again cooking always popular. This is special for Halloween I'm doing Halloween makeup. And so we'll see what comes next. Thank you all for being with us today. Today we've discussed how philosophy of compassionate computing informs all aspects of our work at us. The work is important because we're best when we work from a place of empathy. We know that working collaboratively and a structured manner allows us to build empathy for each other. Whether you adopt compassionate computing are already following shine theory or generous thinking. Part of our work is technology leaders is to know that we are best when we work from places of empathy, and to utilize philosophies and methods like compassionate computing to uplift empathy. And so to close, we wanted to end with just a short clip of a beautiful reminder that we are always all together with the short clip from in the same boat pushed by the same one. Thank you Laurie. Thank you Todd. We really appreciate your coming to see an eye to share these methods and strategies with us it's a pleasure to hear about and really interesting to think about using these kinds of strategies in our day to day work. And I want to thank all of our attendees for joining us today. The floor is now open for questions. Please type your questions into the Q&A box and I will be happy to moderate those and I see that we do have a question now from Michael Seidel who comments that this is very interesting but he asks how are you measuring your success and being compassionate. What metrics are you using compassion is a lovely but nonetheless fuzzy concept that must make measurement hard. I don't know if you want to start on this or I can start a little bit I would say that I would agree. It is, it's, it's to a degree hard to measure. But I think part of the measurement is is how well the rest of the library responds to you and your unit and how they're interacting with you. So, I think there's a long history of in the past of technology workers technology support workers being sort of like they only get told when something's broken, and here fix it and sometimes you fixed it but you didn't fix it the way I wanted it to be. So they, there's a mentality of saying okay, you know, we're sort of just, we're just respond to issues. And through this approach we're taking much more of a partnership approach that, you know, even the staff within technologies, when they fix something they feel pride in that and they feel more of a partnered approach to it. So some of the measurements are, for instance, this last year we had just last month we had our annual employee excellence awards ceremony, and the library department as a whole one behind the scenes award we had you know there's 4050 some nominations on this and there's just a 4050 awards and the technology department as a whole got recognized and this is recognized by the rest of the library staff, as well as the web team got another award for how they worked and build capacity within the web migration so I think those are some of the things that there's not a hard metric to it. We're seeing results, and we're seeing people not being afraid to call up the technology people and say, can you help me with this or I have an idea on this. What do you think about this, I think those type of interactions and coming to us more for as best partners and potential experts in the area rather than sort of not wanting to deal with us unless something's broken kind of thing like that. I want to add on to that the award is a great example. Some of the more hard metrics will expect to have in the next climate call survey, which will probably do in 2024. It's a little while to wait for, you know, for reactions and deliverables. So we're continuing different discussions within the unit, talking about how we work with other people how we want to work, what constitutes job satisfaction for people who work with technology. It's working with technology can be pretty frustrating other people don't understand what the requirements are what the difficulty levels are, and you can just end up with friction. Some of the ways that we can see that we've reduced friction. We actually have more few we have fewer open tickets and we used to. That's really great to see our projects are going faster than they used to and we've implemented overall project project portfolio management so that's done at the different unit level. We have either one month or three months stakeholder check ins. And so we have regular assessment with our different stakeholders for all of the different projects to chart activity progress and success. So that's also been going really well. And the general ease with which we see the department working and communicating with others and the confidence level. So we have a lot of sort of softer fuzzier measures but we also have things like fewer tickets, you know, obviously the departmental awards, and then the different feedback sessions like at the everything disk session which we had just a week ago. Well, and I would say it's it's kind of, in my mind, part of compassionate is also building clear understanding. And I think that's like Lori said coming up with more straight project plans and things like that and part of it was actually becoming more stringent on how we document and say, When is something done when when is your project when do you think your projects completed, and being a bit more firm and how we document and actually have sort of. Okay, no, we actually are finished this process, because there was a tendency, at least historically that projects just language because always the, the goals of the project always changed as the project went on there's like oh no no. We need to change this and this and this so it felt like nothing was ever getting done, but by actually making things a bit more stringent and compartmentalizing the changes or the development. We're actually able to check things off and make progress and it's that clear understanding both between for us, providing the support or development and for those library staff and other users that we support being happy with what we did yes we completed what we both agreed needed to be completed on. Okay, now we can go to the next phase, and a thing like that. It's really interesting that that was a great question Michael thank you so much, and I'm just struck by how the common thread is communication. That can really make all the difference in the world, and Michael says thank you. Please to our attendees feel free to jump in with any questions you might have we do have time here. While we're waiting, if I may ask a question I'm curious to know. How. How common is this kind of a strategy in other organizations and I think what I'm wondering about is when you have a new hire. How much onboarding or a culturation is needed typically to have they seen this kind of approach before or is it all new to most people. So in the digital partnership side, it's very familiar. This is how we work with partnerships a lot of humanities, digital humanities collaboration background with it. It's all over the place. We have so many of our technology workers have gotten used to startup culture or you know turn it and burn it what can you turn around can you sleep on the floor. And really not not acceptable working conditions, or climates and so, and then so many of our workers, you know have come to the libraries because they want a better family environment they want to have time with their families on holidays and things. But then orienting them to. So this, this is how our libraries work and we've just been onboarding several people virtually, which, Todd, if you want to talk about that. So we've got a digital development team who back at the start of this we had, we're building the team up right in the pandemic kit. And then we had one and one of the team leave actually couple the team leave. And so we've actually out of the team of four. We have three people that we've onboarded since the pandemic and they've never seen their offices. They're in remote fashion. But, you know, and I think the communications important doing onboarding we have really good we have onboarding within the libraries as well for new staff, and new staff orientation to the libraries but one of the things that I think is important to, you know, especially with. I come on the library is my background so, but, but a lot of technology people that isn't. And so they see themselves as technology people that happen to be working in a library. And I really want to change that framework and say, Oh, you're a library technologist now, so that they can have that ownership of what they do they just this while I'm just programming this it just happens to be for a library but no take that. You know, it doesn't matter what level of developer to our IT technical support person handling computers, getting them more in that library mindset, I think is really, it takes a while but I think it's something you just keep working with and onboarding and and the communications really good and that communication starts right from the beginning. Even though we hired a developer that's two steps down sort of I don't directly oversee them but the person and even me staying in close contact as that onboarding process came on saying just you know reach out for me any questions you have. You know, things like that and and building those communication paths at all levels in the department is usually, I think beneficial and making them feel welcome as as a whole to the team. But you said also time on people saying themselves not as technologists and not as part of the libraries, we haven't heard that I actually had not reflected that we haven't heard that in over six months now. So we used to hear things in project planning meetings like well I'm not a librarian. Which wasn't any way bad it was just like, that's not my domain, I'm not comfortable with that. And so it was a signaling of distance, you know, and, and other people would say well you're not a librarian and it was like, Okay, we're working libraries we need to have shared communication shared language, you know, and it doesn't have to be the same background, you know, but we need to be able to connect together. And we, so we talked to everyone like look, we're in libraries this is what we do, I have a PhD in English I don't have a library science tree but I consider myself a librarian, not saying everyone has to consider that you know you don't have to identify that way. So we do work in library so we have to identify as library workers. And in talking about that, yeah, we haven't heard that come up from either side, you know, aren't librarians or I'm not a librarian. That hasn't happened in over six months that's a really cool and reflected. Yeah. Really interesting. Super, super interesting. Thank you so much. I appreciate you indulging me my question. And I see that we are just a bit past time here so I don't want to hold you up anymore. But with a huge thanks to Todd and Laurie for coming to see an eye and chatting with us and to our attendees thank you so much for making time out of your day. If you'd like to hang around after I turn off the recording, please feel free to do so. Raise your hand I can unmute you and feel free to have a chat with our presenters or join the conversation. Otherwise, I hope we'll see you back at CNI this afternoon or next week or in the coming days. And take care everyone. Bye bye.