COMMUNITY Exchange

Learn and Share Your Expertise
 

2025 Community Exchange Workshops, and Co-located Meetings

The Community Exchange, held at the Hilton in Anaheim, CA., brings together our community to share technical expertise, impart lessons learned, and discuss visions for the future. As a bonus, our community also offers workshops where we train each other. Please review the topics below! 

NOTE: All events on this page require separate registration through the same portal. Most have an associated fee to help defray costs. To participate in these workshops and co-located meetings, you must register for the appropriate event as part of your overall registration. (View our event registration page for more details.) Space is limited for each of these, so plan to register early! All activities take place at the host hotel, the Hilton Anaheim.

Workshops (Monday, April 28)

Monday Half-Day Morning Workshops:

How cloud enabled data and analytics can accelerate your mission | 8 - 11:30 am

As higher education institutions adapt to new student expectations, tighter budgets, and increasing competition for grant funding, there's growing pressure to innovate faster and leaner. Doing so requires that you develop your people, evolve your processes and in many cases, think differently about how to meet your mission. In this half-day session participants will explore case studies featuring higher education institutions who have built a digital foundation and used AI/ML to tackle challenges in operational efficiencies, advancement, and research enablement. Participants will work in small groups to foster innovation and create plans that support their institution’s mission and strategic goals. Participants will take away actionable insights on how AI/ML can be leveraged at their own institution.

Through a mix of collaborative exercises and higher education case studies participants will walk away with:

• Strategies and templates for building and governing your institution’s digital foundation
• A clear understanding of how cloud innovation can transform the student experience, improve research outcomes, and drive community engagement through the implementation of a digital foundation
• Access to AWS subject matter experts and follow-on resources to continue learning and accelerate your cloud journey.

Join us to position your institution as an innovative leader, driven by a future-ready technology foundation.

Monday Day-Long Workshops:

Vendor and Third-Party Risk Management Workshop | 8 am - 4:30 pm

This workshop will introduce participants to vendor management including the technical, procurement, legal, IT accessibility, information security, and other considerations important to managing vendors and third-parties for campuses. Learn procurement strategies as well as legal terms and conditions that make for successful cloud contracts and how to consider security and risk assessments for services. We will focus on how the IT teams can work with the other stakeholders on campus to better manage vendors and third-parties at scale.

The Path to Network Modernization | 8 am - 4:30 pm

Planning to modernize the campus network is a complex, multi-dimensional challege with many interrelated factors. During this workshop, we'll rapidly go through the process from evaluating the current conditions to visioning, stakeholder engagement, architectural options and a forward looking roadmap. We'll actively do this together workshop style, not as a presentation. You'll come away with practical templates to leverage back home in your institutional planning.

Monday Half-Day, Afternoon Workshops:

Network Troubleshooting with Generative AI | 1 - 4:30 pm

You'll learn how to leverage Generative AI to help troubleshoot network issues. We'll build a chatbot using a common LLM, LangGraph, and Streamlit, and demonstrate how it can be used to query and make inferences on network state. The workshop will include an intro to LLMs, the tools used, and time to work on hands-on creation of a chatbot.

IDEA - Leveraging InCommon for course sharing | 1 - 4:30 pm

As higher education approaches a watershed moment with projected continuous enrollment declines through 2041, according to a 2024 report from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, innovative solutions are crucial for institutional survival and success. This workshop unveils findings from a collaborative investigation into course sharing conducted by the IDEA Alliance and InCommon. We'll explore how IT organizations can serve as strategic enablers, championing secure and scalable tools that facilitate resource sharing and enhance distance learning. Drawing from dozens of focus groups, surveys responses, and interviews with administration, campus IT, distance learning staff, faculty, and others, participants will discover practical strategies for addressing institutional silos, optimizing resources, and implementing technical solutions to maintain academic excellence in an era of declining enrollments. Join us to learn how your institution can transform demographic challenges into opportunities for change through strategic collaboration and technological advancement.

Workshop on Fiber Sensing | 1 - 4:30 pm

In this workshop we will describe the different techniques used to do fiber sensing and we will highlight how the community is using it. Fiber sensing plays a crucial role in enabling continuous monitoring, improving safety and security, reducing costs, and enhancing operational efficiency across a wide range of applications.

We discuss the different technology in fiber sensing, and we will discuss how the current network can enable fiber sensing. We will discuss different use cases in the community with invited speakers that will describe how fiber sensing is helping them solve and prevent events.