Over 110 attendees showed up for a day of connection and learnings. Executive Director Jackie Wirz opened the day with strategic business updates, emphasizing that organizational priorities for the coming year will be focused on internal optimizations to lay the foundation for long-term sustainable growth. The event program and available presentation slides can be found here.
The keynote and fireside chat with Jameka Williams, Executive Director of Member Services and Community Engagement at Merit, the nation’s oldest research and education network, dove deep on an important question that set the tone for the day: “What can we do together that we can’t do alone?” Jameka shared how leveraging Merit’s lessons built over decades of iteration could give Link Oregon a head start in cultivating a strategic ecosystem of partners, collaborators, and community members.
Panels Galore
Panels with experts and advocates from across the state dove into an array of timely topics, including the challenges of creating and implementing AI policies across K‑12, Higher Ed, and Government; the power of regional collaboration across Central Lane in Oregon; evolving AI‑enabled threat vectors in cybersecurity; and a workshop on developing legislative advocacy strategies using real statewide technology initiatives.
Through a live interactive survey, attendees highlighted statewide collaboration strategies, quantum networking, and a shared Security Operations Center as topics they would like to explore further at future Link Oregon member events.
Community Wins
Soundbites Worth Remembering
“It turned out that writing the AI Policy was the easy part. The real challenge was ensuring that we had good guardrails in place to guide users and empower our workforce to use the tools.”
“Is it realistic to expect second graders [with Chromebooks] to type in an incredibly complex password and then get out their fob, and type in the numbers? And who pays for all that?”
“We have one bucket of money, and each dollar that we take for security is quite literally being taken out of a child’s education. We can’t win that battle. So I tell my districts, we’ve got to get creative. We’ve got to get scrappy. And we’ve got to get surgical.”
“Link Oregon’s 400G network is about us being able to deliver high-bandwidth serices to rural and underserved areas. And when it comes to workforce development, this is really the underpinning.”
“The network is more than miles of fiber…the network is the people. The people that make up a community. And that’s what mature cyberinfrastructure produces. A connected community from wildly different sectors, who have discovered the network is what makes their most ambitious work possible.”