Three days, 30 trails, 98 lecturers and 879 participants registered. These are the numbers of the 2015 RNP Forum, which took place between August 25 and 27, in Brasília, and had Mobility as its central theme. About 200 people watched the event by web conferencing and 2,200 through streaming, with 962 hits from Rio de Janeiro, 352 from São Paulo, 214 from the Federal District, 122 from Santa Catarina and 83 from Ceará. Outside the country, there were hits from the United States, Canada, Uruguay, Paraguay, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Slovakia.

One of the highlights was the lecture from Educause’s senior researcher, Christopher Brooks (picture), who spoke of how technology breaks paradigms and leads society to progress. “We are currently living in science fiction. For education, that means that we have the devices at hand. People want to learn from anywhere, at anytime. In two years, mobile learning will be a reality”, he foresaw.

In the opinion of lawyer and professor specialized in Digital Law, Patrícia Peck, and mobility’s greatest effect is that there are no walls for information. She defended that “it is important for the rules to be clear and formalized. The disciplinary matter with regard to the student’s behavior of complying or not with the school rules must be present in the enrollment agreement, in the school’s regulations, in the Students’ Code of Conduct, in the educators’ employment contracts and in the terms of use, especially of the Wi-Fi”.

The effects of the issue on health were also debated. In a panel on the subject, the professor from the Department of IT in Healthcare o the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), Ivan Pisa, said that the creation of mobile platforms and devices in healthcare is still an incipient action in the country. “We need to delve deeper into several matters, such as the need to certify mobile applications in healthcare, in order to ensure the safety of the patients’ information”, he explained.

The Culture trail evidenced the challenges that mobility entails for libraries, archives and digital files. The Photography coordinator of the Moreira Salles Institute (IMS), Sergio Burgi, highlighted the evolution in the intensive provision to the public of museums’ contents in digital environments. “However, we need to bear in mind that the process of digitalization and diffusion needs to be directly connected to the preservation of the original file, for it is the one that will generate the structure to build the electronic database”, he warned.

And with the exponential increase of the quantity of data available, made possible by mobility, the use of cloud computing could be the solution. “The democratization of access that the cloud provides makes the use of new concepts feasible. And when we talk about cloud, we are talking about hybrid cloud”, Microsoft’s Open Source Lead da Microsoft, Alessandro Januzzi, stated.

The 2015 RNP Forum also gave room for the community to show its work. One of the projects chosen to be a part of the agenda was the “De olho no campus” project from the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of the State of Piauí (IFPI). Still at the project stage, the initiative shall work as a smart ombudsman and provide resources to follow up on the investment of funds. Students, teachers and administrative technicians from the units of the Federal Network of Professional and Technological Education will be able to post pictures, videos and testimonies, by means of a mobile application installed in their smartphones and a social network.

Another contribution was the discussion regarding IT’s alignment with the principles of Itil and Cobit, proposed by Jussara Musse, from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul) (UFRGS). “My opinion is that planning is already a path. Once I have identified the needs of the client areas, I define priorities according to the resources I have. I am not able to implement everything from Itil in my organization. I have to extract whatever is possible to apply”, the academic coordinator of RNP’s ESR Security and IT Governance department, Edson Kowask, who took part in the panel, stressed.

In addition to the lectures, the first ESR class distributed from Porto Alegre to Belém was streamed, whose course was IT Risk Management. The high-definition interaction between the Southern and Northern regions was successful and novel in Brazil.

The audience also watched demonstrations of the Mconf systems, which are web-access multi-conference and mobile devices systems; SAGE2 (Scalable Amplified Group Environment2) and GT-Multipresença, a work group of adaptable, scalable and inter-operable system for video communication of 4K mobile devices.

RNP’s News

In the fourth edition of the event, RNP presented the news about the Brazilian academic cloud construction project and the e-mail service pilot.

The head of Services and Solutions, José Luiz Ribeiro Filho, brought the audience up to speed on the Brazilian academic could initiative being structured, named Compute@RNP. “It will be a hybrid architecture, with private and public solutions, both communal and federated. And the services we are developing include platform as service (PaaS), infrastructure as service (IaaS), software as service (SaaS), in addition to virtual, storage, networks e data center computing”, he explained.

The adjunct director of Service Management, Antônio Carlos Fernandes Nunes, for his turn showed the path covered by the e-mail pilot service to the universities. “Last year we began and presented the proof of concept at the RNP Forum. We structured the pilot internally to offer 50 thousand inboxes. But due to contingencies, we had to use our creativity. We negotiated with Zimbra and will offer the pilot to 20,000 inboxes. There will be several domains, 10 GB inboxes, with anti-spam, Zimbra platform and consultancy from the company”, he revealed.

Plenary Session

During the plenary session, the executive officer of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI), Emilia Maria Silva Ribeiro Curi, declared that “the ministry has not been idle, even with the whole crisis, we are seeking other alternatives”.

“Minister Aldo Rebelo meets every Monday with the economics department, trying to lift the contingencies over the FNCT (National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development). This support is very important for social inclusion. The segment where RNP is inserted does not give immediate return. But Science, Technology and Innovation are not expenses, they are investment with guaranteed return”, she claimed.

Check out the full coverage of the event at forum.rnp.br.