Lev Gonick
CIO of Case Western Reserve University
2003 Interview

If you see a white Toyota cruising University Circle, it may be Lev Gonick whose license plate and job title are the same - CIO CWRU. As Chief Information Officer of the prestigious university, Dr Gonick has become well-known for his ambitious, world-class, some would say outrageous projects.

He is going for the “huge win” here because “the community is ready to step up and anything less is not worth doing.”

Dr Gonick recently explained his new TLA (Three Letter Acronym). NAR is short for No Apologies Required and he suggests that CWRU and the city of Cleveland should offer none. “If you say NAR enough it eventually starts to sound like a growl and that’s what it’s supposed to be.”

Q1) You got your BA from Ohio State in Political Science. When did you become a techie?

As an undergraduate, I was interested in computers and did two projects in what was called the PolyMetrics Lab (I don’t know if they still call it that). I was learning to do survey research. I got really turned on to that in the November election in 1980 between Reagan and Carter. I ran, as an undergraduate, a big chunk of the survey that was run in Ohio.

Then in early 1981, I did a survey of children in war zones which was a quantitative analysis of children in Israel and Jordan of some field work I did. And I was the first student at Ohio State, I think, to do quantitative studies not using punch cards. It was the first dumb terminal entry for a complete data set. All of that is obviously urban myth but…

My PhD is in Political Economy and my interest really came when I started teaching in 1987 after doing field work in Africa and India. You really learn something for the first time when you have to teach it.

Teaching Political Economy was so esoteric, no one could relate to it, and here I was coming back from the field with all kinds of stories to tell and the students were kind of snoring through it all. So I started using technology as a hook to engage them.

I used multimedia and had a hypercard stack on Zimbabwe and Zambia and the kids were spending huge amounts of time on my work and I thought hey this is really cool.

Q2) That’s still a long way from CIO of CWRU. What came next?

My multimedia presentations coincided with Gopher becoming the new protocol on the Net. I started teaching all my courses with Gopher. Then in the Fall of 1991 I put together a seminar called Viper - the Virtual International Political Economy Seminar - that was the first of its kind anywhere in the world to use Gopher to support collaboration between 4 universities. That was the beginning of my CyberProf era which predated the Mosaic browser in 93.

In 1993 I was on sabbatical in Arizona and ended up teaching for two years online using the very first Mosaic browser. I taught all of those courses online in a collaborative venture with colleagues in Australia, New Zealand, London, Japan and Columbia to hundreds and hundreds of students for credit.

I was running this out of my garage in Scottsdale, Arizona and all kinds of universities from around the world were asking me to come talk to their faculty about how to use this stuff. Then Cal Poly called me in 94 and asked me to do a gig for them and then to stick around. Starting in 95 I was the Dean of Technology at Cal Poly.

In 2000 I moved to UC Monterey a brand new university and fast forward a year and a half later to October 2001 and I am here.

Q3) Some of your PowerPoint presentations are still online including some old EduPassport portal items that you have brought to CWRU. How is that evolving?

Actually my whole life is online. You can go back and see my original gopher stuff.

We are about to launch the EduPassport implementation right here. We have something called MyCWRU - a personalized, customized individualized experience here at the university based on how people work, study and play.

We are going to be the first campus that we are aware of to deploy at a technical level an enterprise portal using web services - the XML SOAP protocols.

Sun and Oracle are major sponsors. We just demonstrated it in Atlanta and got calls from Carnegie Mellon and Notre Dame. Notre Dame is coming to spend a whole day with us to figure out how they can replicate the model.

Our Version 2 release specification will include some things that honestly no one has ever done in the portal space. - Complete VOIP solution built into the portal, it will involve streaming media nested inside the portal, it will use SIP as the protocol - both voice and video will be SIP protocol.

We are just totally jazzed. It’s a unique space that we have the opportunity to create - not just stickiness in a traditional marketing sense but really creating a customized experience for students from prospect to grave.

Q4) Why did you come to CWRU?

In higher education today, all modesty aside, there is not another university in the country that is better known in terms of its cutting edge effort whether it’s the switched gig network, the portal project, the wireless deployment, the web services effort.

At the Internet2 meeting in Colorado, Ken Klingenstein who runs a big part of I2 turned to one of his colleagues at Georgetown and said “CASE is back” That’s a statement that takes us back to Darpanet.

The three short answers are that public education in California was going to be hitting the wall and I could see the handwriting on the wall and I didn’t want to manage the coming education downturn.

A second issue was I immediately gravitated to University Circle. This is an amazing complex of 19th century institutions. How do we turn all of that into 21st century institutions? What a great challenge.

The third piece is my wife is a Clevelander. We spent the first 23 years on my passport - we agreed the next chapter belonged to her and when the opportunity came up we agreed it was time to open the new chapter.

Case is a great university with an incredible legacy. The timing is such that it is looking to distinguish and differentiate looking forward building on its legacy. Blend that with the opportunities in University Circle - the sand box we are playing in. If we succeed in all this great technology at Case and we don’t do anything in University Circle it will be a failure. It’s just an enormous opportunity to create synergies.

We’re doing a joint performance of dance and music between Cleveland and LA in real time with surround sound music on 3 video screens at 300Mbps. That I can tell you has never been done - anywhere for anything.

We have a new project we are cooking up to commission what we are calling a real world symphony - with a very well known name world talent that we can’t name now - to be played in 5 cities in real time - Australia, Japan, London, Russia and here in Cleveland for North America

When we said we were going to do dance performance everyone laughed at us but now that it’s actually happening they see we’re serious.

Engineers, when you tell them you want to build a fast network, are like kids in a candy shop. They so overbuilt the infrastructure the engineers said ‘No Problem’ but the managers are saying “Oh my God! - we’ll have to shut down all traffic between Cleveland and Columbus on the way to LA to make this thing happen.

It’s all about extending the possibilities and encouraging people to extend their imagination and challenge them with world class projects

Q5) What’s the Digital Cleveland Project?

Digital Cleveland is a strategy for developing the prerequisites for economic development in the 21st century. You didn’t have meaningful agriculture in the 19th century until you figured out how to deal with the Erie Canal and basic transportation

In the 20th century you didn’t really have a steel industry until you had a combination of shipping, railway, etc.

And you won’t have the prerequisites for a 21st century economy play until you build up the infrastructure to enable it.

The impulse is to let the private sector take care of your infrastructure but history has shown that the public sector has played a major role in enabling the infrastructure - whether it’s airports, train terminals, ports. Then the private sector can take over and add a huge amount of value.

Digital Cleveland is premised on the same idea. It’s really about

1. Smart Kids - using the technology to support education,
2. Healthy cities using tech to deliver a 21st century health care model using the core competencies of this community.
3. Smart government - creating government services that actually work and what a great opportunity to talk about a turnaround - here in the city of Cleveland.
4. Smart future-oriented economic development - not only software but leveraging the manufacturing base we have and giving it an advantage in the global economy

I don’t want them to be an either/or - we are really excited that Digital Cleveland is now being considered by everyone as one of them.

by Dan Hanson.