IWMW blogs

I am Natasha Bishop, Events and Marketing Manager at UKOLN, responsible for all the logistical arrangements for IWMW.  The Events Team of myself and Michelle Smith are there to ensure that people arrive at the right place, attend the right sessions and eat the right food.

If you have any questions (sensible or otherwise!) you can find us at the registration desk throughout the workshop.

What To Expect?

This is the fourteenth in the IWMW series of events, which was launched in July 1997 – just two months after the Labour party was elected into power.  That now seems a very long time ago! People who have attended IWMW events over the years will be familiar with the format of this year’s event, but what can newcomers expect when they arrive at the University of Sheffield on 12 July?

Opportunities for those New to the Sector and to the Event

We might expect to see significant numbers of newcomers at this year’s event in light of the stories I have been hearing regarding the early retirements and redeployment of staff in some institutions.  Those who are newly appointed  in institutional Web teams and those who are new to the higher education sector should find that the variety of talks and sessions at the event will provide a useful way of both updating the set of skills needed by those involved in providing institutional Wb services and understanding how these skills can be used within the higher education context.

Newcomers should also find that the event can provide an opportunity to establish contacts with one’s peers within the community.  Establishing an effective community of practice can be particularly valuable within the public sector, particularly in the context of the Web management community’s culture of openness and sharing. The workshop sessions will normally provide an opportunity for everyone to participate in the discussions. In addition if you feel that you would like to contribute to the event (perhaps, for example, there are areas of work you are particularly proud of which you would like to share with others) you will be able to  put your name down to host a barcamp session.

The social events will provide an opportunity for informal networking. On the first evening the workshop dinner will be held in the central dining room in the Edge at the University.

The following evening we are pleased to announce that there will be a drinks reception at the Kelham Island Museum. This museum houses the objects, pictures and archive material representing Sheffield’s industrial story. The drinks reception at the museum will begin at 19:00 and there will be plenty of time to explore the museum. Afterwards you will be free to visit local restaurants and bars before making your own way back to the University.

Still Relevant for the Seasoned IWMW Participant!

Those of you who have attended several of the IWMW events will be familiar with the format of the event. The programme for this year’s event, however, introduces some new areas. As indicated in the theme for this year’s event, “The Web In Turbulent Times“, we will explore the new challenges for institutional Web teams, who, after over a decade of growth, will now have to provide existing services (and still be expected to exploit new opportunities) in the context of reduced budgets and, possibly, reduced levels of funding. We will therefore be providing a number of plenary talks and workshop sessions related to the “Economic challenges“.

As in previous years we will also be providing updates on new developments which are of relevance to those providing institutional Web services.  Areas to be addressed which will be of interest to many are Mobile Technologies, HTML5, the Social Web and Linked Data and RDFa, not forgetting, of course, the best practices for managing institutional Web services.

If you have attended previous events but haven’t given one of the plenary talks or facilitated a session you may wish to take the opportunity of giving an informal talk in one of the barcamp sessions.

An Opportunity to Participate

Over the past 5 years or so we have used the IWMW event as an opportunity to evaluate a variety of new Web technologies. Such experiments provide an opportunity to identify potential benefits in the context of a trusted environment – and also allow participants the opportunity to evaluate such technologies which may also be of interest for use locally.

This year we are building on the success of the IWMW 2009 blog. This year’s blog incorporates the BuddyPress plugin and so provides a social networking environment which can be used by participants. You may wish to use this in advance of the workshop, perhaps for discussing travel arrangements or other aspects related to a trip away to a conference. Workshop facilitators and speakers may also wish to use the environment to support their talks and sessions.

We hope all participants at this year’s event will make the most of the opportunities provided at this year’s event.

Doing The Day Job

In addition to a number of specific areas (such as the Mobile Technologies, the Social Web and Linked Data and RDFa, together with the  context of Economic Challenges) which have been summarised on this blog, the IWMW 2010 event will, of course, address the various  mainstream aspects of providing institutional Web services – the day-to-day responsibilities of the various members of Web management teams.

Plenary Talks

Susan Farrell‘s plenary talk has the provocative title of “Are web managers still needed when everyone is a web ‘expert’?“. Susan will point out that “While most senior managers would agree that the web is mission-critical, at a time when budgets are tight it becomes increasingly difficult to persuade them that employing skilled web professionals is vital. With devolved publishing models in many institutions and the increasing use of social networking, senior managers might be forgiven for assuming that managing a website is easy. Surely everyone is a ‘web expert’ now that 74% of the UK population spend an average of 13 hours a week on the web? So are web professionals really needed?“. This talk seems likely to generate much discussion at the event!

The theme of the role of Web team in an era of a new Government with different expectations of the role of public sector organisations will be addressed by in a talk entitled “‘So what do you do exactly?’ In challenging times justifying the roles of the web teams“. In this talk Ranjit Sidhu will ask “Are there lessons that web teams can take take from the for-profit sector to stop what they are doing becoming a vague proposition to those who set the budget? Also, do the web teams need to claw back roles given away freely in the past or would this require a complete change of mindset?”.

Paul Boag will address the economic challenges higher educational institutions are facing in his talk “No money? No matter – Improve your website with next to no cash” in which he will describe how Web managers should go about the processes of understanding the benefits of realigning rather than redesigning; apply practical techniques to simplify their websites; break down complex projects into simple phases; make use of the services provided by third parties and look beyond the website as a way of reaching potential students.

Finally a session entitled Doing the Day Job will provide a number of talks about key services followed by a panel session discussing what a Web manager’s day job is, what it should be and what it shouldn’t be.

Workshop Sessions

The workshop sessions will provide an opportunity to address issues in more depth.

• The session on “A Little Project Management Can Save a Lot of Fan Cleaning … or (Agile) Project Management for the Web” will explain what project management is and how can it help Web managers, covering issues such as common misapprehensions about project management; nightmare situations when development work goes wrong and explore both agile and traditional approaches to project management.
• The session on “Usability and User Experience on a Shoestring” will explore how Web teams can ensure that websites are as effective and engaging as they can possible be at a time in which investing resources into usability or user experience (UX) work may be seen as an expensive luxury. In this interactive workshop, participants will explore ways in which user experience methods can be made more cost-effective yet still provide tangible benefits; for example, by adopting low-cost ‘guerilla’ methods for user research and evaluation and adopting a more user-centred philosophy within an organisation.
• The session on “Taxonomy: Creating structure across content using metadata” will describe how use of a taxonomy in creating structured content allows emergent patterns in content to drive navigation. By using a taxonomy to create novel tags for content it is possible to produce strong navigational effects and use this to encourage investment in metadata in your content.
• The session on ”Inside the Pantheon: A Dreamweaver framework for managing dynamic content” will describe how using Dreamweaver as a publishing interface may not have been considered for institutions who want to manage their dynamic web content as its traditional focus has been on editing static web pages. At the University of Kent, however, time and resource issues required an intermediate solution to roll out a new branding across the institutional websites. In the process a framework (codenamed Pantheon) was developed for pulling in and managing dynamic content using static pages together will  a series of tools integrated with Dreamweaver to ensure that departments had great flexibility in creating good looking web pages.

The Importance of the Social Web

It is probably true to say that the increasing importance of the Social Web in supporting institutional activities was not expected within many educational institutions. But we now know that social networking environments, such as blogs, micro-blogging services such as Twitter and social networking services such as Facebook do have a role to play in supporting institutional activities such as student recruitment, marketing, supporting teaching and learning (including informal learning activities), supporting research and, of particular relevance to IWMW 2010 participants, supporting communities of practice.

Plenary Talk

Suraj Kika, CEO of Jadu (one of the IWMW 2010 sponsors) will give a talk on Social Networking – The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media and the Implications for HEI Web Masters. The talk will be based on a report of a survey of the UK HE institutional Web Management community which was carried out by Jadu, with the support of UKOLN.

The report, which has been summarised on the UK Web Focus blog, is based on sixty responses which were received from 44 HEIs across the UK (36 in England, 3 in Wales and 6 in Scotland). The responses wcame from people working in Web management, marketing, media and communications, learning and development, business, libraries and IT management and services. From these responses we learnt that the two most frequently used external social networking tools are Twitter (68.3%), YouTube (60.7%) followed by social networking tools such as Facebook and MySpace (57.49%). 47.3% of respondents intend to adopt Twitter over the next two years; 41.8% intend to YouTube and 41.1% social networking tools such as Facebook and MySpace.

The report identified the following major issues which the community is seeking to address:

• The challenge of developing a business case for social media.
• How should a strategy for social media be developed – top down, bottom up (user driven) or collaboration?
• Control – can unrestricted use of social media continue given privacy, data protection, intellectual property and brand protection issues?

Workshop Sessions

A number of 90 minute long workshop sessions will be seeking to address some of the challenges identified in the Jadu report.  These include:

• ‘Follow us on Twitter’…’Join our Facebook group’ which recognises that while use of social media tools is now recognised as an important medium to communicate with our audience, many institutions are still in the dark as to how best to use these tools to support recruitment, build brand and reputation, and facilitate better internal communications. The session will explore how institutions should approach the use of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, and participants will have the opportunity to develop guidelines on using social media for their areas of work. There will also be opportunity to discuss how best to respond to negative comments and how to deal with awkward postings.
• “Sheffield Made Us – using social media to engage students in the university brand”  which is based on a case study which describes how between April and October 2009, the University of Sheffield ran a competition encouraging students to upload videos to Youtube with the incentive of a £3000 prize with the aim of getting the students to express in their own words what they thought of the University, and how Sheffield had made them. The films that will  be displayed sound intriguing as they “range from those that are moving to those that are funny, and some that are downright bizarre“!
• A session on “WordPress beyond Blogging” provides a more technical focus, with an introduction to managing a large multi-site WordPress installation and providing real-world examples that demonstrate the versatility of WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS). In the session participants will be asked to think ‘beyond blogging’ and consider WordPress as a popular, low-cost, cutting-edge technology platform serving the needs of research, teaching and learning and institutional Web managers.
• The session on “Engagement, Impact, Value: Measuring and Maximising Impact Using the Social Web” acknowledges that the Social Web is now widely accepted as having an important role to play in supporting institutional activities with many (if not all) universities now having a presence on Social Web services such as Facebook and Twitter and services such as iTunes and YouTube becoming used to provide delivery channels for institutional content. It is therefore timely to identify emerging best practices in use of such services. This session will review institutional approaches to use of the Social Web services. Participants will explore the reasons for using such services and also discuss possible concerns and dangers in such usage. The session will also explore ways in which usage of such services can be measured in order to provide evidence of their effectiveness.

The first two of these sessions will take place on Monday 12 July with the other two sessions taking place the following day, therefore allowing participants with a particular interest in the Social Web to be able to attend two workshop sessions in this area.

As part of the recent government announcement on IT cutbacks the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills announced that it is to cut funding for the Institute of Web Science at Southampton University, worth £5 million this year. Despite this news, Tim Berners-Lee has suggested that the “Web Science future is bright” and pointed out that:

“It is clear from the new Government’s Big Society declaration, the Coalition Partnership and speeches such as David Cameron’s to TED before the election that open government data is a high priority. Our understanding is that the data.gov.uk portal will in fact grow significantly in the months to come.“

The importance of open access to data funded by the public is, of course, applicable to the higher education sector as well as central and local government.  An understanding of the relevance of recent technological developments such as Linked Data and RDFa will therefore be important for those with responsibilities for opening up access to institutional data.

At this year’s event we are featuring two workshop sessions which address this topic:

• Adrian Stevenson, Thom Bunting and Mark Dewey will facilitate a session on “RDFa from theory to practice which ”will introduce the concepts of Linekd Data and RDFa and provide examples of applications which can be used to produce and consume RDFa Web resources”.
• The following day participants at a session on “Looking at Linked Data facilitated by Chris Gutteridge “should come away from the session with an idea of what is and is not practical, and some of the technical and political issues involved in providing useful Linked Data“.

We have scheduled these two sessions to be held on different days so that participants wishing to quickly gain an understanding of developments in this area will be able to do as at this year’s event.

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NOTE I have just spotted that BBC News item published earlier today which informs us that “David Cameron to make more government data available“. David Cameron is quoted as saying that “So we’re going to rip off that cloak of secrecy and extend transparency as far and as wide as possible. By bringing information out into the open you’ll be able to hold government and public services to account“. I feel that it will be important for Universities to be pro-active in ensuring that their data is open and available for reuse by others.

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Importance of Mobile Technologies

The high level of interest in use of mobile technologies by higher educational institutions is apparent from the popularity of the recent Eduserv Symposium 2010: The Mobile University.

As described by Andy Powell in a post on The implications of mobile… or “carry on up the smart phone” which summarised the event, Chris Sexton (IT Services Director of the University of Sheffield and the opening speaker at IWMW 2010) felt that “the question is not, ‘can we afford to support mobile?’ but, ‘can we afford not to?’“.

But what are the issues which need to be addressed? And what can we learn from existing work in this area across the sector?

Plenary Talk

A plenary talk by Damian Steer, ILRT, University of Bristol on “Mobile Web and Campus Assistant” will use the Mobile Campus Assistant as a case study. This was created by staff at ILRT, University of Bristol in order to “make time and location sensitive information available to students via their mobiles and location-aware smart phones. For example, where is the nearest available PC? When is the next bus to the hall of residence? Which library is open now?“. The talk will also provide an introduction to the mobile web, examine the capabilities of current mobile phones, how they are being used and who uses them.

Workshop Sessions

There will be a number of workshop session on use of mobile technologies at the event, each lasting for 90- minutes including:

• A session on “Location Based Services Without the Cocoa” will explore the potential of  (smart phone) mobile devices which have location sensors such as GPS, compasses and accelerometers and how this has generated an explosion of new location- based services ranging from simple navigational maps to augmented reality.
• Another session on “Stylesheets for mobile/smartphones” will explore the ways in which stylesheets can be used which will give a better experience for users of mobile devices.
• A session on “Mobile Apps vs Mobile Web” will explore how the Mobile Web is shaping up to deliver critical institutional information and address questions such as “Where does teaching and learning come in?” and “Do we need an app for that?“
• “Designing, developing and testing a location aware learning activity using QR Codes” which will highlight another aspect of mobile technologies – how QR Codes can provide a low threshold technology for the creation of  interactive, location aware learning activities, including applications such as campus or building induction tours, health and safety tutorials in lab, and off- campus learning activities.

We have scheduled these workshops so that two of the sessions take place on Monday 12 July with the other two on the following day  to ensure that those with a particular interest in mobile technologies will be able to choose from a number of options.

Last week the new Coalition government unveiled their £6.25bn spending cuts. The Department for Business Innovation & Skills (BIS) has the Higher Education budget down for £200 million in efficiencies.  It is likely to be a very difficult few years for all working in the HE sector and the Web management community is likely to be no exception. We have yet to truely see where the budget cuts will fall but there is little doubt that finances will be tight, resources will be limited and there may be many more restrictions on the way we work.

What affect will this have on our institutional Web sites? What effect will it have on our community? What effect will it have on our jobs?

This year’s IWMW theme is the Web in Turbulent Times. Our economic challenges have us set for bumpy ride so we have a number of plenary talks and parallel sessions that aim to equip Web managers with the know-how to justify their worth and make prudent savings which still allow them to still provide an efficient service.

Plenary Talks

On Monday 12 July we open with the ‘The Web in Turbulent Times’ session. Our opening plenary by Chris Sexton, Director of Corporate Information and Computing Services at the University of Sheffield, will set the scene and talk frankly about what lies ahead.

Susan Farrell‘s talk on Are web managers still needed when everyone is a web ‘expert’? follows. Susan points out that now that budgets are tight managers may start to look at devolved publishing models and fail to see that employing skilled web professionals is vital. Surely everyone is a ‘web expert’ now that 74% of the UK population spend an average of 13 hours a week on the web? Are web professionals really needed? Susan’s talk will consider how and why web professionals should actively fight for recognition.

On Tuesday in the ‘Web in Difficult Time’s session Ranjit Sidhu, founder of statistics into Decisions asks  So what do you do exactly?. Ranjit’s talk, like Susan’s,  aims to help us justify the role of Web teams, but he does this by seeing if there are lessons to be taken from the commercial sector. He also proposes that web teams need to claw back roles given away freely in the past, which may  require a serious change of mindset.

Paul Boag, Creative Director of Headscape, then offers a more practical approach to budget cuts by saying No money? No matter and helping Web managers to Improve your website with next to no cash. Paul will be offering up 5 powerful techniques which include enabling us to understand the benefits of realigning rather than redesigning and start breaking down complex projects into simple phases.

Parallel Sessions

A workshop session on Developing Your Personal Contingency Plan: Beat The Panic facilitated by Keith Doyle of Extreme Usability will take a positive look at how sometimes forced situations (like redundancy) can allow you to take a positive look at your future.  Keith has experienced being made redundant, finding work and providing work. He will share some of his experiences and then work with the participants to build their ideas. This will include: making the most of where we work now; portfolios and interviews; setting up a business.

Demonstrating effeciveness is now key in order to retain finances. The workshop on Engagement, Impact, Value: Measuring and Maximising Impact Using the Social Web facilitated by Brian Kelly will explore ways in which usage of such social networking services can be measured and ways in which such metrics can be used in order to enhance the impact of institutional activities.

The economic climate may be gloomy but IWMW is hoping to make it a little less so!

I’m Brian Kelly and I set up the IWMW series of events back in 1997.  I was chair of the event until 2005 and since then have been the co-chair with my colleage Marieke Guy.

I am the only person to have attended all 13 previous events and am fascinated to see how the Web management community has developed over the past 13 years (which, incidentally has coincided with the period of the Labour government).

I’m looking forward to meeting many of the friends and colleagues I’ve got to know over the years and also to make new contacts.

Particular interests of mine are the ways in which new Web technologies can be used to enrich the effectiveness of events such as IWMW.   We will continue to support use of Twitter at this year’s event (note that the event hashtag this year is “#iwmw10#) and will be using the iwmw Twitter account to provide news and updates (so if you are new to Twitter feel free to follow the iwmw account).

A new feature this year is use of the BuddyPress plugin on this blog which will provide an opportunity for participants to engage with their peers in advance of the workshop.  So as well as the discussions  we will have during the three days at Sheffield I hope that the collaborative aspects of this year’s blog will provide an environment for discussions to be had prior to the event.

I’m Marieke Guy. I’ve been with UKOLN for 10 years working on lots of different projects connected to the Web, organising stuff on the Web, preserving stuff on the Web, using Web tools and so on.I’m currently working on the JISC Beginner’s Guide to Digital Preservation.

I’ve been attending IWMW since 2000 and have been co-chair with Brian Kelly since 2006.  I do a lot of the organisation, pull together the programme, create the Web site and blog and add my feminine touch to the event!