Join the SUIT Working Group

Dear colleague,

SUIT — Sustainable University IT Infrastructure & Technology — is a reference document suite produced by an international working group of academic-community members: university IT decision-makers, architects, engineers, teachers, researchers and students. It sets out a governance and engineering reference for building, operating, and sustaining research and education IT infrastructure at a modern university. The documents are institution-neutral and vendor-neutral by design, so any university can adopt them directly and instantiate them to its own context. (In SUIT, “sustainable” means built to last — longevity and continuity over time, not environmental.)

The suite is now public, in open source:

Where to start

You do not need to read everything. Start with the two executive summaries — the Policy Summary and the Solution Summary. Together they take well under an hour and give you the full picture: what the suite stands for, what it proposes, and how it is meant to be adopted.

The invitation

The working group is in formation, and at this stage joining is deliberately informal: no charter to sign, no workload commitment — simply your name alongside ours, your critical eye on the documents, and your voice in shaping where this goes. Decision-makers, architects, engineers, teachers, researchers and students are all equally welcome; so are colleagues you think should see this.

The easiest way to take part is our one-page form — no GitHub account needed. Register at the level that suits you: support the initiative, become a member of the working group, or also appear as a contributor. Just fill it in and confirm by email — individuals and institutions are equally welcome.

Of course, you can also write to Nicolas Guelfi (nicolas.guelfi@uni.lu) to share any question, objection or doubt. Those are just as welcome as agreement: the suite is built as an always-living document, and it improves through exactly that kind of feedback.

I remain at your disposal for any question related to this initiative, and I hope you will join the group.

The four documents

• 📗 SUIT Policy Summary — an executive companion to the Policy: the decisions and their justification, condensed for governance bodies.
• 📘 SUIT Policy — the governance reference: principles, obligations, and the policy framework for sustainable university IT. For the academic community, university leadership and decision-makers.
• 📕 SUIT Solution Summary — an operational executive summary of the Solution: what to build, in what order, and why. For the CISO, the CTO, and infrastructure/network leads.
• 📙 SUIT Solution — the technical reference: architecture, controls, and operational design that realise the Policy. For architects, engineers, infrastructure and network teams.

Each layer also comes with an anticipatory Q&A / argumentation module that answers, evidence in hand, the questions and objections each audience typically raises:

• 💬 Governance layer Q&A
• 💬 Technical layer Q&A

And a first concrete, named edition shows what adoption looks like in practice — the University of Luxembourg instantiation, deposited as the worked example any institution can pattern its own edition on.