A shared, humane picture of the work happening across NIC.
Compass is an institutional awareness and alignment platform. It surfaces the conditions of the institution — hidden labor, capacity, unmet needs, friction, interests, and bright spots — so faculty and leaders can have more honest, grounded conversations. It never scores, ranks, or evaluates a single person.
What it is
A way to see patterns before they become crises
Many institutional conflicts arise because groups operate with incomplete information. Faculty may feel unseen. Chairs may not know where burdens concentrate. Deans see symptoms but not causes. Compass gives the institution a low-friction way to understand:
It collects small, carefully framed signals — a semester contribution snapshot, optional capacity and interest indicators, lightweight pulse questions, a needs board, and support/friction signals — and turns them into carefully governed views. It does not replace policy, contracts, shared governance, chair judgment, or faculty voice.
What it is not
The labels that would break trust on day one
Compass intentionally avoids becoming any of these. The product enforces it in code — there is no score, rank, productivity, service-point, or compliance column in the data model, and there never will be.
The trust model
Principles that hold even under pressure
Compass is built so the easy thing to do is also the trustworthy thing. These aren't slogans — they're enforced in the data model, the visibility rules, and the language guardrails.
Understand the institution, don’t judge faculty
Color and condition labels describe institutional areas — never people. There is no evaluation surface for any individual.
Patterns, not rankings
Compass surfaces themes and conditions across the institution. It never produces a comparison between people or programs.
Support conversations, don’t replace them
The output is a better-informed conversation between people — not an automated decision or a verdict.
Aggregation protects trust
Anonymous and aggregated results are gated by a minimum group size, so a small group can never be singled out.
Faculty get value first
Faculty see their own mirror and the institutional context they contribute to — value flows to them before it flows up.
Insight language matters
Reports describe conditions and opportunities. Evaluative, blaming language is blocked by a guardrail before anything publishes.
How it works
Every signal closes a loop
Signals become themes; themes become governance-reviewed insights; insights become supportive actions; actions produce outcomes the institution learns from. Nothing is published without review, and an outcome is a change in conditions — never proof of causation, never a verdict on a person.
Faculty experience their own version of this loop — Reflect → Discover & Act → Connect → See it mattered — so contributing never feels like feeding a black box. Interest is always a conversation signal, never a commitment.
Who it serves
One picture, seen at the right altitude
Each role sees a view scoped to what they should — and nothing they shouldn't. Anonymous and aggregated results are gated by a minimum group size so a small group is never identifiable.
Faculty
A ~5-minute semester snapshot and the occasional 30-second pulse. Discover needs to engage, connect with colleagues, and see how your signals mattered — anonymized and aggregated.
Division chairs
Stewards and sense-makers, not managers. They listen, understand division conditions, and tend to people — with a private notebook, never an evaluation surface.
Deans
See division and program conditions, steward needs and initiatives, and close loops — always at the level of systems, never individuals.
Leadership
The institutional cabinet sees institution-wide aggregates only — climate, capacity, momentum, and emerging risk across NIC.
Governance working group
A faculty group that vets every question for fairness and reviews insights before they are ever published. Nothing reaches anyone without their review.
Support offices
Service offices contribute operational and friction signals about systems — describing where processes snag, never the staff who run them.
Adoption at NIC
The hard part isn't the software — it's trust
Compass earns its way in, it isn't mandated. We start small, with people who volunteer, behind clear guardrails, and we only expand if trust holds.
Start with
- Volunteers, not mandated users
- Clear, visible guardrails
- A small, focused scope
- Value faculty can feel first
- Honest, two-way feedback
Don't start with
- Mandatory, campus-wide use
- Leadership dashboards first
- A compliance framing
- Performance or contract use
Pilot · one semester
10–20 volunteer faculty across disciplines, 2–4 chairs, a dean observer, and the governance working group. The goal is to test trust, usefulness, and question framing.
Reflect
The working group reviews trust feedback openly, refines questions and language, and decides — with faculty — whether the experience felt supportive.
Expand by invitation
Only if trust holds does Compass widen — to more willing departments, never by mandate, and never reframed as oversight.
The pilot expands only if trust remains intact — the bar is that a clear majority of participating faculty find it supportive or neutral, with no major unresolved trust concerns.
See it from the inside
This is a working prototype. Step into any role — faculty, chair, dean, leadership, governance, or a support office — and explore the experience for yourself.
Explore the roles