What is UC Tech?
UC Tech is the annual conference hosted by the University of California system to celebrate and promote innovation and collaboration within the community. Each year, a different UC campus is selected to host the much loved event over a few days. Each day features a broad spectrum of talks and serves to enlighten, enrich and encourage.
The vision of UC Tech is to foster an inclusive and collaborative community of professionals that continually improves services that place the University of California system at the forefront of higher education, research, and patient care.
UC Berkeley is honored to be co-hosting UC Tech 2023 with UC San Francisco to celebrate its 41st anniversary as a hybrid conference with in-person and online presentations and associated events.
The Theme
Resilient, Rising and Reinspired is the theme for this year’s UC Tech conference which brings technologists from across the University of California system to celebrate and promote innovation and collaboration. This theme seemed to fit as a timely reminder that technology professionals have worked diligently over recent years and remained resilient, agile, and responsive to the changing higher ed landscape. This conference is an opportunity to acknowledge this hard work and to recognize this as an inflection point. Looking forward, we are reinspired to bring together our UC Tech community to share ways in which we are rising to meet old and new challenges, and to build, connect, and grow our IT support, services, and collaboration.
As the Programming Committee met and held a brainstorming session around what the theme should be, the group soon came to a consensus on what we thought UC Tech attendees may be feeling. We wanted to have this come through in our design. The ability to visualize our resilience, our rising determination, and the re-inspired ideas we champion was all included in the thought throughout the design process.
Individually and collectively, we are like the phoenix rising from the ashes. The phoenix is a mythical golden bird associated with renewal and regeneration. Rising from the ashes of its previous life, the phoenix is a symbol of hope, of life, and of better things to come, born from the knowledge and experience of difficult times and challenging circumstances. Here in the golden state, gold is the color of excellence, woven through our University of California community signifying how we rise not only to and from our challenges but also how we are in constant pursuit to rise above the rest. Even our motto “Fiat Lux" brings this golden energy, translated as "Let There Be Light."
We want to honor the last few years of our collective strength and resilience both in our work and in our personal lives. We also want to remain present as we continue to transition, inspiring and uplifting each other as we go. Allowing the diversity of our UC community to empower and help nurture our future together as we continue our transformative journey. We are all golden birds in flight, in what we bring to the greater whole.
Why is the origami bird, specifically the traditional Japanese origami crane a good symbol for our conference? The crane is thought to represent good fortune and longevity, and its wings are believed to provide protection. Gifting an origami crane continues to be a symbol of hope and love. Learn more about the history and symbolism of the origami crane | Create an origami crane
The Audience
UC Tech welcomes all UC staff and faculty who are associated with or interested in technology. Topics for presentations range from the latest innovations, service delivery, project management, procurement, and more. Participants include technical support staff, system administrators, unit directors and managers, librarians, information security experts, service managers, and others. UC Tech is a great place to build a network with colleagues from across the UC system. Having this network allows for more collaboration and can open doors to learning how other campuses address technology issues and challenges.
History
UC Tech began as a grass-roots effort by UC campuses to share common knowledge and information formerly known as the University of California Computing Services Conference, or simply UCCSC. The first “conference” was at UC Santa Cruz in 1982, and the focus was strictly on academic software and it was held in a conference room on campus with 21 people in attendance. Technologists from the UC campuses have met each summer since 1982 to discuss common issues and ideas associated with providing and supporting information technology services at the University of California. From humble beginnings, UC Tech now broadened its scope and reach, bringing together about 700 professionals from across the University of California to share knowledge to better support our respective universities and the world-class UC system as a whole.