Inclusive Design Institute

The Inclusive Design Institute (IDI) is a research community and regional research hub focusing on the inclusive design of emerging information and communication systems and practices. IDI infrastructure is designed to enable full participation by researchers with diverse user needs and supports inclusive participatory design. IDI is a community that values collaboration, inclusive participation, transparency, and openness.

Where we've been

The current infrastructure that runs the IDRC's core services has been built over the past 3-5 years. It has served the center well, but is showing its age. We currently provide ad hoc computing and storage on an aging set of 5 Sun machines that was donated in 2007, with some of the virtual machines actually predating that by quite a bit.

Users of the systems often find them inflexible, closed-off and confusing. People have to contact a system administrator for just about any sort of change. Getting a new service spun up often takes more than a day, with unclear deadlines and communication practices around the activity. Users cannot do anything themselves, and everything is a singleton task.  

The IDRC needs to move to a *self-service* utility computing model that doesn't require administrator intervention for most things.