Indexing important meetings

I joined the Open University’s Academic Planning Office in 1979 as an ‘Administrative Grade 1A’ at a salary of £4,382 a year (for the curious, the Bank of England’s calculator tells me that this was the equivalent of £22,337.42 in 2019. The scale was annually incremental and went to a dizzy £6,555 – some £33,414.37 at 2019 prices). One of my most significant assigned duties was to “..develop, produce and maintain a compendium of University resource allocation policy“. These few short words of description turned out to have a major significance, in that there was not (and never had been) such a compendium through the first 10 years of the University’s existence, and nobody had given much thought to how it might be created or structured to be a workable tool. The most useful available resource for this was the long run of minutes and papers of the University’s ‘Planning Board’ which was administered from our department. I decided to prepare a computerised index and summary of the decisions of the  Board based on the supprting papers and minutes. The Board had responsibility for all resource allocations across the University and most issues involving spending and allocating money to programmes and projects, came before it for discussion or approval.

This was a powerful body and it made a lot of decisions, many of which were inspired and led to significant developments in the academic programme though a few were probably quixotic and based on informed ‘hunches’. The Board was chaired by Professor Norman Gowar – with the responsibility of Pro Vice Chancellor (Planning). Norman was a superb chair, a pioneering member of the Mathematics Academic Staff that had built the University from scratch from 1969, and as a result he had a complete grasp of the University, how it worked, which areas were successful and which not so. A popular and effective PVC, he was approached informally (often in the Cellar Bar at lunchtime) by people wanting to talk about new projects, developments and interesting schemes that required funding. He was adept at brokering these to find the best and making worthwhile things happen quickly.

Sperry Univac Terminal

I set to work with Chris, our Planning Office programmer, and he devised an input screen attached to the University’s Sperry-Univac mainframe which recorded the date of meeting, the paper and minute number, the decision, how much money was allocated and to whom, and details of any requirements for review. Then followed several months of painstaking work in ploughing through dog-eared committee papers and minutes, and abstracting copious details into the computer system. Eventually it was complete, including details from the most recent meeting, and I was rather proud of it. Chris provided us with a simple search interface so that anyone with a terminal could look for keywords, people, funding areas or a receiving body and quickly find all the supporting information and references to Planning Board decisions.

I presented the new system to Norman Gowar – and together with my Line Manager Peter Bristow, we made various searches and experiments. All brought up extremely useful and convincing references. Norman thought for a while about how useful and powerful this was.

‘Does this mean that we can easily find out exactly what we have decided, how much we allocated and who is responsible?’

‘Yes – that’s the idea’.

‘Hmm – I think this could be quite dangerous – there’s too much information here that could come back to haunt us later. I don’t think we’ll be able to use it.’

The system was quietly shelved…

Lessons Learned: Sometimes a system can be too good for its own good. Obscurity can be a powerful weapon.