OK, here's the deal.

Last Friday, I flew down to Northern California to visit with my family and participate in my fantasy baseball league's auction draft on Saturday.

Sunday I flew to DC. OK, that part's theory. In practice, I got as far east as Phoenix, missed my connection by 10 minutes, got rerouted to Las Vegas then on to a red-eye to Newark, then Monday morning caught a shuttle flight to DC.

Why, you may ask, did I put myself through that kind of hell to get to DC? Because I testified in front of Congress; specifically, the House Government Reform Committee, on exactly how broken the current processes are for trying to get a visa to enter the US. (short description: submit application, wait 3-5 months, come in for interview, get asked a few irrelevant questions, get random answer). So by getting to DC midday Monday I still had time to get briefed and prepped to testify (and get some sleep -- I arrived at our DC office on exactly one lousy hour of sleep).

Side note: I was flying US Airways/America West. They just merged -- sort of. The tickets and flight numbers are sort of merged. The branding is not -- it's a huge, confusing mix. And most of all: the employees are totally, utterly checked out. Zero customer empathy -- they don't care, and they can't be bothered. DO NOT FLY US Airways or America West. They don't deserve your business.

Testifying went well. Yo-Yo Ma was also on the panel with me, talking about how difficult it is for artists and performers to get into the US as well. The committee was very receptive.

Tuesday afternoon I spent 4 hours on the Mall in DC with my camera. Took almost 500 pictures. I've culled down to about 50 I like, and am cleaning them up for posting to my Flickr site. Stay tuned...

Wednesday morning I flew home and went in to work.

Tonight I head out with my daughters and their school choir (on another red-eye, two in one week) to Philadelphia and DC (another two-fer-one special this week).

So I'm behind on everything. Sorry about that. Next week will be better. Promise.

I'm in the CHI 2006 session on Schools of Information, aka 'i-schools.' The session chair suggests that i-schools focus on information as the central concept vs. computers or computing.

There's no single model for an i-school; some evolved from computer science, some from library science, some are hybrids of several departments. There are about 20 i-schools in North America. They tend to grow up in places where there isn't already an independent School of Computer Science, at least partially as a way to raise the awareness and importance of subfields (like HCI) that tend to get buried in a department of CS that's buried in an engineering school.

If you imagine a triangular 'problem space' with information, people and technology at the points, you've mapped out the area of concern for an i-school.

This 'i-school movement' raises lots of hard questions:

• is HCI more central/relevant to i-schools than to Computer Science?
• will it make HCI even less central to CS?
• what publications are important for tenure decisions?
• is research biased toward studies and away from actually creating intellectual property that could be commercialized?
• over time, will i-schools 'silo' to the detriment of interdisciplinary subfields (like HCI)?
• what's the difference between a 'school of information' and a 'school of informatics'?
• within i-schools, is HCI in danger of becoming too diffuse?
• will i-schools buck the trend of the overall decline of enrollment in CS programs?

This is a very frustrating session. There's a long list of audience members waiting to comment or ask questions, so I'd never make it to the mike before the session ended, but they're asking all the wrong questions.  They're focused on branding, identty, and how to facilitate interdisciplinary work. The right questions to ask are all more basic:

• what kind of jobs are your preparing people to? (one of the panelists said that he hoped that their graduates would go to work in other i-schools!)
• have you actually talked to any employers to see if they value what you're offering?
• How do you 'market' i-schools to the rest of academia and to industry?
• where do researchers in your field publish? (besides CHI)
• Is it easier of more difficult to get funding for research when you're in an i-school vs. a CS, engineering or other school?
• will i-schools create anything that will ever get commercialized? (I realize this is in my list above, in a slightly different form)
• is this really anything more than an attempt to get HCI and interdisciplinary work more respect wthin the university?
• What kind of degrees do people get from an i-school, and do they mena anything to anyone? Is the undergraduate degree BS or BA? (similar question for the master's degree)