By now I am guessing many of you have heard that I have started. I’ve been on campus since Monday, September 14th but I haven’t had the opportunity to meet all of you yet. For those of you in IT Services, it may not be until our Town Hall next week. For those who might be stopping by it may be a bit longer. At any rate I wanted to say hello, introduce myself, and share a bit about what I hope this space can become. I have been meeting with quite a few people already and have had the distinct pleasure to see some of the amazing sites our University has to offer. It is quite a stunning place.

I’ve been blogging for quite some time and have always found it to be a great outlet to work through ideas, share thoughts, communicate my thinking, and invite comments and feedback. I will use this space as much as I can and I imagine it will change over time. Early on it will mostly be about reflecting on what I am learning and to share initial thoughts on my interactions on campus. As time goes on I expect it to become more of an outlet to keep people posted on what I am working on, thinking about, and pointers to things that are of general interest to me, to the campus community, and to those from the outside looking in.

Please consider this first post as an invitation for you to be active participants in this space. I am a believer in the notion of the web as a platform to support “conversations” and this space will be one vehicle I will use to offer opportunities to engage in conversations. It won’t be the only venue for that and in the coming days and weeks I will be sharing other opportunities for us to get together.

We are all incredibly busy doing what we do to support the faculty, staff, and students of our institution and taking time to blog may seem like a waste of cycles to some. To me it is part of the larger process of communicating across the institution. I can’t meet with all of you on a regular basis, the reality of time and scale just will not permit it. If there are things that you want to know from me that you think others will benefit from hearing, send me a note and let me know, that could very well be the prompt I need to take some time and articulate some thinking.

For now you should know that I am very active on the social web, some for me personally and some for professional pursuits. I don’t maintain multiple accounts, as I try to think of my online identity as an aggregate meta identity, so you won’t need to follow me across various twitter accounts, there is just one. I try very hard to maintain my social presence in an intelligent way, Facebook for example, is reserved for family and non-work related friends. Twitter is the place where I am active on the social web in an open way, so that is the place to follow me.

This is as much an invitation as it is an introduction, an invitation to engage in new forms of conversations. I will work to do my part, but my hope and ultimately, my expectation, is that you will be a part of this. I am well aware this will not work for everyone, but if it opens another channel for those that it does work for then I have succeeded in one small way. I will close with a very humble thank you, thank you for allowing me to become a member and a leader of this team. I will do my very best every single day to make sure we are delighting the people that count on us the most at this great University.