Monday, August 26, 2019

Office of Human Rights, Equity and Inclusion offers fall sessions

The Office of Human Rights, Equity and Inclusion is excited to announce that our Fall 2019 Workshop and Training Sessions are now live and ready for registration. We invite you to view the Fall 2019 Training Catalogue and to sign-up for any of our workshops.

This fall, we are excited to offer a number of education and training opportunities across our various portfolios: Equity, Sexual Violence Response and Prevention, Conflict Management and Human Rights, and Indigenous Initiatives.

Our offerings include workshops such as:

• Equity 101
• Anti-Racism Workshop
• Responding to Disclosures of Sexual Violence
• Verbal De-Escalation and Crisis Intervention
• Giving Bad News
• Managing Difficult Conversations
• And so much more!

These highly interactive and impactful workshops will facilitate discussion and understanding of the institutional and societal contexts for equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization and provide concrete pathways to build more inclusive practices into your daily work. By taking part in these workshops, faculty, staff, and students can learn about concepts and develop key skills to help create more inclusive classrooms and workplaces and build a more productive and welcoming environment for colleagues and employees.

Our workshops will be offered multiple times throughout the fall semester and most are open to all staff, students, and faculty! Be sure to register as soon as possible to secure your spot.

Learn more by viewing our Fall 2019 Training Catalogue, where you can read about our full suite of workshop offerings.

We look forward to seeing you at our workshops this fall!

If you have any questions about our education and training opportunities, please contact Joseph Pazzano, Senior Education Officer.

IST launches new campus emergency notification tool

A message from Information Systems & Technology (IST).

The University’s current emergency desktop notification tool, UW Emerge, will be replaced with a new tool called WatSAFE desktop notification.  

UW Emerge was developed by University employees several years ago, and while it has worked well in the past, IST no longer has the inhouse resources to modify and fully support the tool. Also, the new macOS no longer supports 32-bit applications, a change that prevents new users from downloading UW Emerge to their Mac machines.  

WatSAFE Desktop Notification (powered by AppArmor) will modernize our campus emergency alerting infrastructure, while integrating seamlessly with the existing emergency notification system. Administrators will be able to leverage the cloud-based dashboard to monitor and maintain emergency desktop notifications, from anywhere, at any time.  

WatSAFE Desktop Notification will be pushed out to all IST-managed machines via SCCM (additional installation notes below). UW Emerge will continue to be available and will be included in future tests of the emergency notification system, until further notice.    

The update will take place on Wednesday, August 28 at 10:00 a.m.

What do you need to do? 

• Windows (IST managed): After WatSAFE desktop notification has been pushed out, clients will be required to log out of their machine and back in again to complete the installation.  
• Windows (unmanaged machine): To install WatSAFE desktop notification on an unmanaged machine, clients should follow the steps outlined in this knowledge base article, https://uwaterloo.teamdynamix.com/TDClient/KB/ArticleDet?ID=84925 Administrative privileges may be required to complete the installation.  
• Windows (responsible for a group of non-IST machines): If you are responsible for managing a group of machines outside of IST, you may request a package-based deployment version via Request Tracker (RT), https://rt.uwaterloo.ca/SelfService/Forms/IST-General/ 
• Mac: The Mac version will be announced later in the fall term.  

Additional communications will be made available when the Mac client is available, and when the decision has been made to uninstall UW Emerge.