Sub Ubi

I suppose I should finish the “site redesign” thread (part one and two).

My “proposed redesign” is more of a sketch than anything else. And it has rapidly evolved past any specific comments or criticisms of my own department’s web presence, and become more of a statement regarding my thoughts about how to support the community that exists within a department, online. Shared goals are part of what defines a community, as well as clear and unhindered communication. Most academic departments (all around the world) manage the shared goals bit, but often fall down on the communication bit due to politics, schedules, and the general business of the academic lifestyle. Between teaching, research, the neverending quest to publish and obtain funding, as well as administration—well, it often makes for a busy day.

One way to provide structure to this communication and collaboration (online) is centrally.

The challenge to centrally managing a website like this is that the webmaster/mistress must be incredibly well integrated into the community to be effective. Faculty, staff, students of all kinds, as well as other departments are all, in a sense, customers to the service that a webmaster provides. Are all of these people able to adequately achieve their goals and communicate effectively via the WWW? What services and content must be added, designed, built, or possibly removed, refined, and replaced to achieve those goals and facilitate communication? Meeting the needs of all of these disparate groups involves being aware of what is going on, the various needs of each of these communities, and the ability to respond quickly and with agility to new and shifting needs.

Of course, people who are plugged in to a community this way are often called deans or pro vice chancellors, or something similar—they don’t have time to build effective websites. They would probably benefit from the existence of such a website, however, as it is their job to be on top of the state of the community.

The other way to manage this is to decentralize the process.

In the decentralized process, each stakeholder in the community contributes to and is responsible for their own cloud of information—a constantly changing, dynamic resource for their immediate peers and colleagues. And each group can peer into the process by which the other communities organize, share, and move information. The webmaster simply becomes responsible for the connective glue, and is no longer primarily responsible for information and content on a broad and overarching scale.

But this is not how academic departments work—because in the first model, it is clear what role the webmaster has: they’re a gate keeper. They say what does and does not happen on the WWW. If they are truly amazing, they enable the free flow of information into and out of the department via the WWW. If they are not, however, then they can become roadblocks, preventing the easy dissemination and communication of information within and without of the department. In the second model, it isn’t obvious to the community what the webmaster does, because if they do their job right, the infrastructure just works, and everyone is happy creating and sharing content.

And, the reason I know this kind of thing cannot, and will not, happen, is it represents too much loss of control. No-one likes giving up control—it’s hard, far harder than most people think. Furthermore, a site this dynamic requires participation on the part of all of the shareholders; even though the individual contributions are small, and actually things they do already (via email, in the hall, over the phone, etc.), it will be perceived as being much more work than it actually is. The idea will die, and, we will build no communities today.

Fortunately, ideas are free. Regardless of whether the department I am part of now, or part of in the future, decides that this is an interesting experiment to engage in, the idea exists. It has been written down. It is there for others to be inspired by, or ignore, or tear apart, or build upon. In fact, we’ll make that explicit:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5
License.

This post and the images contained herein are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike license. Feel free to rip, mix, and burn, as long as you provide a pointer back to this document.