A student-run group that provides more than 6,000 Web sites to students, faculty and student organizations will go offline starting July 1. UW-Madison's Division of Information Technology will take control of the group's management of these sites.
Students' Information Technology organized in 1997 to provide Web space for anyone at UW-Madison who needed it. Bob Plankers, a systems engineer at DoIT and one of the founders of SIT, said SIT was not designed to serve UW-Madison in the long run.
\SIT was done with intent that it would be a temporary solution for a more permanent problem. ... As time has passed, there hasn't been any movement by the university for doing something like this,"" Plankers said.
According to Kathy Dwelle, director of communications, organizational and student initiatives at DoIT, interest in SIT has waned as original members have graduated and new Web storage services have developed.
""Last fall when we were to apply for funding again, a bunch of us decided that we're just done with this. ... The university needs to step up and do it,"" Plankers said.
DoIT will take over the SIT service but few changes are expected.
""Initially the service won't look any different. It'll be a little bit easier to monitor, and our help desk might get involved,"" Dwelle said.
Plankers said he expects the services offered by DoIT to be the same as those offered by SIT.
""We're offering 50 [megabytes] to students and 100 megs to organizations. ... Any organization that has asked us to increase the limit, we have done so,"" Plankers said.
DoIT's involvement in the student organization's Web service will not be much of a change overall, Plankers said.
""I will be actually one of the people who will continue to tend to SIT until SIT is replaced by a bigger, better service,"" Plankers said.
This service, according to Brian Rust, senior administrative program specialist with DoIT, will operate under the same policy guidelines as SIT.
""SIT operates under the appropriate use policy-the same policy we all use,"" Rust said.
DoIT will not police these sites for content but will report complaints of misuse to the proper administrators.
