When I die, Dublin will be written in my heart, said James Joyce and I understand where he is coming from, when I visited Dublin this week for the HEAnet Group Advisory Forum. It was quite a flying visit, arriving late Tuesday evening, and leaving Wednesday afternoon, but I did manage a quick walk around the heart of the city before heading back to the airport.

I was in Dublin for the HEAnet Group Advisory Forum where I provide an international perspective for the group based on the work, I do at Jisc. HEAnet is the Irish NREN, whereas Jisc is the UK NREN. In many ways we are similar, and in many ways, we are very different. A lot of the things that Jisc do, are done in Ireland by EduCampus, who work very closely with HEAnet.

Of course the size of the countries is very different, the Republic of Ireland has a population of just over five million, whereas the UK is just under seventy million.  Despite the differences in size of student population, and number of universities, there are plenty of similarities in the challenges and issues that both organisations face. It would not surprise you that cybersecurity is up there at the top, as is analytics, and increasing demand for bandwidth.

As I was in Dublin, this did mean, that for the second year running I missed our all-staff Jisc conference in Birmingham.

I continued to work on the shared services report. I also did some researching and planning for an internal blog post for next week on the report.

Next week I am presenting on the smart campus at the Education Summit in London. I only have a fifteen minute slot, so spent time condensing a presentation I would normally use and thinking about what and how I would talk about the topic.