UK: Widening a lady's net

JANET* is not the name of a respectable middle-class housewife, probably from Morningside, the posh part of Edinburgh, but it is the acronym for one of the world's leading research and education networks. It styles itself as "a mission-critical asset for all involved in education, training and research" and has ambitions to work with other sectors beyond its 18 million users in the UK and to learn from the rest of the world. So it has appointed Steve Hogger as its first head of international relations.

Hogger came from the Department for Education, now the Department for Children, Schools and Families, where he worked in various forms of information technology, including cooperating with JANET to ensure that schools and students were connected to the network. After a secondment to northern Spain where he helped to develop an IT strategy for schools there, it seemed logical to apply for this new post.

"My job is about trying to bring coherence to this huge range of activity in educational networking," Hogger says. "There is a lot going on. Customers include schoolchildren wanting to find out about other cultures and languages in collaborative learning, to very high-end particle physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider."

He says internationalism is increasingly important, with universities recruiting foreign students and setting up campuses abroad and young people are now taking part in the "massive explosion in social networking".

JANET, which is funded by UK taxpayers via the higher and further education funding councils, already participates in TERENA, the trans-European research and education networking association, which Hogger describes as the club for organisations like his, and is involved in GEANT2, (acute on E) a pan-European network covering 34 countries.

"We are all struggling with the same sort of issues, we don't want to re-invent the wheel. We are all working to resolve common problems. In the past, maybe we haven't been as good European players as we might have been, preferring to resolve our own solutions. Now we need to play a greater part in the next phase of GEANT (acute on E). One of our experts will lead on identity management."

This is a process which will allow students and teachers to move around computer systems seamlessly. So it will involve issues such as access, safety, security and intellectual property.

Hogger is already looking beyond Europe. He sees enormous potential for collaboration in the growing economies of Asia, India and South America. In Brazil, JANET is working with the health service to provide gateways for health IT. "We work closely with the south Asia equivalent of GEANT, and we're keen to strengthen our links with Africa."

He is also hoping to set up an arts and humanities collaboration with universities in the US. "We would be able to help with high quality video-conferencing master classes with, say, an actor in The Globe. There's a huge appetite for British culture and many American universities are rich enough to pay for it."

It will be a globe-trotting life for Hogger. He has already embarked on a series of visits to other networks around Europe and is eagerly anticipating working with Vietnamese educationists following a recent meeting.

*JANET is a registered trademark of the Higher Education Funding Councils for England, Scotland and Wales.

diane.spencer@uw-news.com