If you remember your spaghetti westerns, the greatest threat to a cowboy isn’t a shootout— it’s the settlements slowly encroaching on the frontier and his way of life. So it goes in the world of IT at U of T.
Stefan Zukotynski doesn’t look like a cowboy. He wears glasses and the list of research interests on his web site includes “plasma assisted chemical vapour deposition of thin film amorphous semiconductors.” Stefan Zukotynski is definitively un-cowboy-like in every way, except in his relation to the Learning Management System known as CCNet.
In software development, “cowboy coding” is used to describe a distinctly individualistic, go-it-alone methodology. CCNet—decidedly unflashy and functional—had “cowboy” written all over it. Before moving to U of T’S Central Networking Services at its height, the server containing a large portion of the university’s grades was kept under Zukotynski’s desk. “It was really organic,” says Zukotynski, “there was never any marketing push or anything like that.”
In the 2004-05 school year, 1,856 courses at U of T used CCNet and 150, mostly confined to the Faculty of Medicine, used Blackboard. But as of October, according to the Arts & Science Vice- Dean Students Suzanne Stevenson, the edge has shifted to Blackboard (58 per cent of A&S courses, as opposed to CCNet’s 40 per cent).
When Zukotynski got frustrated trying to develop a course page using WebCT (since bought out by Blackboard) in 2002, he enlisted the aid of a student, Keyvan Mohajer, who further developed the software after graduation, extending usage to other professors. CCNet was born.
Zukotynski argues that in contrast to Blackboard, CCNet was easy for professors to learn. “We have to make it very easy, extremely user friendly, so that an average instructor can start using it quickly.”
In June 2007 the university told Zukotynski— and all U of T instructors—that CCNet would not be receiving university support this year. When they came back to Zukotynski in August, because Blackboard could not yet carry all the university’s courses, he shot back with, for the first time, a licensing fee: the same amount Blackboard was getting per course. “That, I think, scared them out of their minds.” No riding into the sunset just yet.
His is a compelling story, but according to Marden Paul, the university’s director of strategic computing, CCNet is a cowboy competing with at least half a dozen other LMSs for university resources. Frontier life at U of T is fast disappearing. Settlement encroaches.
U of T’s IT frontier could be said to run along the very unassuming Galbraith Road, with the Galbraith Building on one side and Simcoe Hall on the other. In fact, the geographic midpoint between Zukotynski’s office and the office of Marden Paul could very easily be the parking attendant booth.
As overseer of how all the disparate parts of the school’s IT connect—not just LMS, but also things like the online library and classroom podiums— you’d expect Paul to have a different perspective than Zukotynski’s. And he does, but it’s due to the experience of one who has gone to the frontier and come back, realizing that a person can’t live the cowboy lifestyle— and stay sane—forever.
When Paul talks about his experiences coding (for a large clothing company, and then United Way), there’s a certain swagger in his voice, an individualism that was present in Zukotynski’s story as well. But his employers’ dependence on Paul came back to haunt him. Until about 2002, he kept an old DOS PC at his U of T desk in case the company called, needing some new code. This arrangement, Paul is the first to admit, was more than a bit silly—and pretty risky for his former employer.
Like companies in a capitalist economy, like universities, it is the nature of software programs to expand and multiply. There comes a point where there can be no wild west anymore, because there’s no land to roam on. In Paul’s telling, the numerous email systems (at least 128) once used at the university is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons.
In his 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin borrowed an example from William Forster Lloyd to illustrate the existence of “no technical solution problems.” In a pasture open to all, every herdsman will be motivated to add an animal to his herd because he shares the cost of the ensuing environmental degradation with everyone else using the commons, while sharing the profit of that extra animal with only himself. This human behaviour leads to ruin for all.
Ironically, information technology— or, more accurately, the proliferation of IT core systems, such as email, calendars, and LMS in the face of limited university resources—can be described as a no technical solution problem.
“This allocation is not malicious or intentional, it’s just what happens over time because the core service is essentially not as good as the one I can do locally, and that makes a lot of sense until time passes,” says Paul. When a user chooses a program, that user enjoys the freedom and individualism of a homegrown LMS, while dividing the negative aspects of decentralized core services with everyone else in the university. As an aggregate, this can lead to a misallocation of the university’s resources: the cost of Blackboard is paid many times over in the cost of several cowboy LMSs.
