Last week, I posted to one of the geekier support groups on campus about the possibility of setting up a web based authentication to allow the iPod Touch, PSP, Nintendo DS and other devices that can’t use the current method of authentication. I was expecting a rocky ride as the geeks there are very alpha in nature and are just as likely to spew Napalm as to support any idea that one of the lesser geeks comes up with. What I got was an interesting surprise, and perhaps a look into the heart of the alpha geek.
The first responses came within minutes and were what I expected – “what a stupid idea”, “it’s not a complete/secure/sustainable system”, “the input method sucks”, “waste of bandwidth” – but what surprised me was that these lesser alphas were trumped by two of the top alphas who said that thinking about these alternate devices was a good idea and one of them actually pulled out a link about a web based shell that has an iPhone as it’s example.
So what does all this have to do with looking inside the heart of the geek? Well, it means that geeks are truly no different than any other interest group – there are conservatives and there are Luddites there as well. People want to stay with what they know and what they feel safe with, regardless of how close to the edge their profession takes them. For schools, this might help some teachers understand their IT staff. For other groups trying to integrate technology, it helps to explain why IT staff pile on the restrictions.
This is probably blatantly obvious to some people, but there are many people who ask me every week about why their department has rule x or y or why you have to do z on campus. So it’s for them that this post might help – just as with any other support group, there are enablers and restrictors. Sometimes the restrictions are there to protect the users, other times they are there to protect the admins. If you are unfortunate enough to come up against restrictive IT, it might be an idea to just keep asking questions and ask them at all levels – eventually one of those questions will hit gold and and you might see change in even the most dug in of IT groups. Sometimes the restrictions might actually make sense in the bigger picture and the questions will help everyone understand the rules a bit better.
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