Network Planning Workshop
Here at ORION, we are forming our three-year network plan together with our community. It all started last May at our Advisory Group Meetup when we brainstormed priorities. Last October, we held a Design Thinking Workshop in which we uncovered some network challenges and opportunities in our community. At those events, we laid some of the groundwork for our new long-term plan.
In March 2020, ORION held a Network Planning Workshop to further assess the changes and challenges faced by our community. This workshop enabled ORION to get direct feedback and input from our community, and to work together in developing our network priorities. We are working hard to engage our community when it comes to new opportunities and thinking about ORION’s future.
Engaging with our community
I started the session by sharing ORION’s existing features and recent improvements around cybersecurity and network resilience. Our goal at ORION is to be as transparent and as engaged with the community as possible.
Identifying community priorities
Together, we identified the criteria that we felt should inform how we prioritize ORION network improvements. We then collectively discussed ORION’s network project ideas, holding them up against our evaluation criteria. We thus arrived at the two key ORION network priorities that our community members felt were most important to them:
- Network operational improvements
- Additional peering (and cloud) partners
Thank you to our constituents
Workshops like these ensure that we are in touch with the changing needs and priorities of the community. We want to send a big thank you to all constituents who participated! We are committed to keeping actively engaged with our constituents. Together we can work towards meeting the ever-changing needs of Ontario’s research and education community.
Thanks,
David Smith