Blog Statistics

We are publishing the following statistics for future reference. They are intended to inform others about the lifecycle of the blog.

Use of the Blog

Active Dates: Posts were published on this blog between 8th June 2011 and 1st September 2011.
Number of posts: 59 published posts, 12 of which were guest posts.
Number of comments: 35 comments were published, consisting of 3 comments and 32 automated ping messages.
Usage statistics: Between 5 July and 31 August there were 1,418 visits to the blog and 2,471 page views. There were 157 visits on 25 July, the day before the start of the IWMW 2011 event. A graph of the usage statistics are embedded below.

Browser usage: The following browsers were used: Firefox (47%), Chrome (25%), Safari (13.7%), IE (13.3%), Mozilla Compatible (5.4%), Android (2.2%), Opera (0.3%), Blackberry (0.2%), IE (0.2%) and Mozilla (0.1%).

About the Blog

Users: 5 Administrators, 2 authors, 6 contributors, 7 subscribers.
Akismet statistics: 328 spams caught and an overall accuracy rate of 99.18%.
Details of blog theme: Twenty Ten 1.2 by the WordPress team
Details of plugins used: Akismet, Embed Object, Google Analytics
Details of type and version of software used: WordPress (3.2.0).
Blog licence: This blog is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence (Attribution – Non-commercial – Share Alike). Comments are also covered under this licence.
Right Hand Sidebar widgets: About this blog, search, recent posts, calendar, Admin, Twitter widget, Licence.
Look-and-feel: The blog home page is illustrated below.

Screen dump of IWMW 2011 blog

We thought it would be useful to share our promotion channels and give people the opportunity to comment on what we do and make suggestions for next year.

Web sites and blogs

We promote IWMW on the following Web sites:

• IWMW web site
• UKOLN home page
• UKOLN events page
• JISC Events

Brian and I mention IWMW on our blogs:

• Ramblings of a Remote Worker
• UK Web Focus

We also encourage plenary speakers, parallel workshop facilitators and sponsors to blog and write about the event in the weeks before it.

Emails

Over the years we have promoted IWMW on a number of JISCMail list including the following:

• The web-support JISCmail list which currently has 587 members.
• The website-info-mgt JISCmail list which currently has 568 members.
• The Admin-HEERA JISCmail list which currently has 834 members.
• The Digital-Preservation JISCmail list which currently has 1,263 members.
• The LIS-LINK JISCmail list which currently has 3,435 members.
• The LIS-Web2 JISCmail list which currently has 805 members.
• The LIS-Webpeople JISCmail list which currently has 156 members.
• The Mobile-SIG JISCmail list which currently has 207 members.

We have in the past also sent email information about the event to  webmaster@foo.ac.uk. Recently this hasn’t been particularly successful as the webmaster email address appears to be defunct or is being used as a support rather than a contact address.

Occasionally we email local Web teams and groups such as the scottishwebfolk JISCMail list.

Twitter, RSS and more

We regularly update the iwmw Twitter account and update the IWMW RSS feed (this is the 2011 news feed, a new feed is set up each year).

We use various social networking tools including:

• Slideshare e.g. see the IWMW 2011 Slideshare group.
• Lanyrd e.g. see the IWMW 2011 Lanyrd group.
• Facebook e.g. see the IWMW 2010 Facebook group.
• Ideascale e.g. see the IWMW 2011 Ideascale page.

If we have time we have printed out flyers and taken them to relevant events to hand out.

However at this year’s event a number of people told us that they hadn’t heard of the event until this year and could possible have missed the booking deadline. Are we missing other dissemination channels? Is there anywhere else we could be or should be promoting future IWMW events?

General

• Richard Nurse – Libwebrarian: IWMW 2010
• Nicola Osbourne – IWMW 2011 Live blog
• Kris Collins – IWMW Event 2011: Responding to change
• Brian Kelly – New Opportunities for the Institutional Web Management Community

Plenaries

• Paul Walk – The Strategic Developer at IWMW11
• Martin Hamilton – Embedding Web 2.0

Parallels

• Marieke Guy – The Economical way to Amplify Your Event
• Martin Hawksey – Google Spreadsheets as a lean mean social bookmark/share counting machine

Remote Attendance

• Janet McKnight – IWMW 2011
• Martin Hawksey – Institutional Web Management Workshop 2011 #IWMW11: Watch remotely, see the Twitter community grow and maybe some live notes

If you have written a post add a link to it in the comments section.

*********

Firstly, thanks to the UKOLN team and University of Reading for hosting another great IWMW event. It was great to see so many familiar faces and equally pleasing to see so many new ones.

As most of you will know, Siteimprove were holding a free draw to win a Kindle. Thank you to everybody that took the time to enter and our congratulations go to the winner – James Parry, Web Development and Support Officer at the University of Oxford.

Part of our entry form asked four multiple choice questions about the use of each institution’s internal search. The background to this was a case study Siteimprove undertook with Leeds City Council that demonstrated how some simple changes made to commonly searched terms could generate significant potential savings. Please find a summary of the questions we asked below.

• Has your institution ever measured the variation in cost between handling an enquiry online versus offline. 88% of you answered no.
• Do you ever adjust the order of results on your search results page based on the offline enquiries you receive? 81% of you answered no.
• Do you regularly create sponsored links to promote upcoming events, i.e. open days and graduation? 56% of you answered no.
• How regularly do you review your internal search engine statistics?

18% selected every 2 weeks.
38% selected every month.
22% selected every quarter.
22% selected less frequently than every quarter.

A more detailed summary will be made available for any person that would like to receive it. Siteimprove are also planning to run two short webinars in August to explain the case study and demonstrate ways in which Universities may be able to make similar changes using their own internal search engine. Those that indicated they would like to take part in the webinars will be contacted with a choice of dates to attend. If there is any person that did not get chance to enter but is interested in learning more about the case study, then please contact info@siteimprove.co.uk for details.

We look forward to seeing you all again at IWMW12!!

Thanks

We then used the voting pads to decide on which legal issue we wanted to hear about first. The order was as follows:

1. Cookies

European Union e-privacy directive has been amended to state that explicit consent must be given before cookies can be used. No detail in implementation has been given and nothing to be enforced for 12 months (May of 2012). This means 12 months for Web manager to work out how to do this i.e. so that users actually see that they are accepting cookies.

The possible options are to change your site to be compliant (you can only get out of it if cookie is necessary for strict function of Web site). You could have an entry page that says that people have agree to cookies or you could take some steps in preparation but wait to implement and see what happens. Alternately could not do anything, lobby the government and hope that it is sorted out by next year. Note that Google Analytics code counts as a cookie. JISC Legal plan to come up with some guidance in this area.

Some institutions are already dealing with this by relying on a privacy statement. To sum up this is a problem that wasn’t there that someone has tried to solve!

2. Legalities of the Cloud

A number of legal issues the come up, primarily data protection and that data cannot move outside the European Union unless certain criteria have been met. Safe harbour is the US way of getting round this – Google and Microsoft have signed up to it, Amazon have suggested that they will have an EU base. Google said they would use a base in Ireland, but their agreement is still not ready. What students have in their email is not related to data protection, but staff email is and is held on behalf of the university.

JISC Legal already have briefing papers on this area.

3. Your Institution’s Risk Appetite

Jason explained that this is a grey area and we have to live with it. However it is worth knowing that being how much risk you take depends on what your aims are and being very risk adverse hampers your mission. Your institution risk appetite needs to be explicit and supported (when things go wrong), possibly in the form of a risk policy. The EDINA social media guidelines are suggested as a useful resource.

Jason gave the analogy of medicine where surgeons are allowed to do pioneering surgical procedures in order to ‘move on’ in medicine, risk is mitigated, but there are still risks.

4. The Digital Economy Act

We’ve all heard of the DEA – legislation that specifies that copyright infringement by a user can result in a termination of the infringers’ Internet connection. The suggestion is that if there are 3 copyright infringements then the JANET connection will be cut off – this is totally unworkable. There needs to be some balance here with regard to copyright and monitoring infringement. Web managers don’t necessarily need to take action but you do need to educate your users and encourage appropriate respect for copyright.

5. Mobile Learning

No law has changed but the technology is constantly moving on. Lots of new technologies such as geolocation, tracking data, augmented reality have recently hit the mainstream – quite often technologies move on without considering all the issues. Often there are papers and policies in this area, for example there is a new paper coming out on data encryption. Our role (could be) to ensure that the pursuit of technology doesn’t overtake consideration of relevant issues

6. Proper Data sharing

As a sector we are pretty good in this area. You can already sign up to the privacy promise pledge made by the information commissioner, but there has been suggestions that we could share more, for example by annonymisation. However there are cases when data sharing can affect lives so we need to bear this in mind.

There were a couple of areas that we didn’t have time for:

• Protection of Freedoms Bill
• Using Licences Well
• The Equality Act 2010
• Your Champions and Support

This slide is also available on Slideshare.

It turns out that the Information Commissioner is based in Wilmslow, Jason’s suggestion was that you base yourself as far away from there as possible!!

Park House Bar is number 8 on the Whiteknights map.

The bar serves food till 8pm.

Adobe Connect is based on Adobe Flash technology but an app is also available that will still let you watch the streaming. It is marketed as a “complete enterprise webinar solution to increase attendance, boost response rates, and generate more interest through rich and engaging, highly-interactive and impactful online events“. Collaborate, who deliver live webcasting and web conferencing, have sponsored our use of the software.

iPhone app for Adobe Connect - swf pods will not work but streaming will

The live link will be available from this page before the start of the event.

Note that the session will be recorded, including all chat comments, so think about what you say!

If you have any questions about the service please contact:
Pauline Foley
Sales Manager
Tel: +44 (0)1483 685008
Mobile: +44 (0)7787 269643

Last year our sponsored delegates did a fantastic job of helping out with much of the back room work that goes on. Between them they blogged, videoed, interviewed delegates and wrote reviews of sessions.

This year’s sponsored delegates have a lot to live up to.

We’d like to give them an opportunity to introduce themselves, say why they applied and what they hope to get out of the event.

Mike McConnell, University of Aberdeen

I have attended IWMW for around ten years and been part of its associated community for 10 years and the benefits accruing to my institution have been enormous. These include, but are not limited to, advice on selecting and implementing an enterprise level content management system, building a useable information architecture, working with external consultants, legal and policy advice, practical strategies for Web 2.0 use, using data creatively via mash-ups and apps, the use of third party applications like Google Maps, resourcing and staff issues, etc etc.

In terms of my participation I can bring my considerable experience to discussions and am happy to facilitate any parallel sessions if necessary. I would be an enthusiastic participant in any social activity.

We have already signed Mike up as the chair of, what he calls, ‘the hangover shift’ – the Wednesday morning Session on Improving Visability.

Guy Berresford, Web Analyst, University of Nottingham

I would like to attend this year’s IWMW, but my institution is only funding two places. I attended Birmingham, Bath and Sheffield and had a great time at each. I was actually hoping to present one of the parallel sessions at some point.

I have 11 years experience of the web including SEO, Analytics, Adwords, Information Architecture, Usability and user centred design. Being able to attend would be a great opportunity to both share my knowledge and learn from the other attendees.

Guy has offered to use his skills as a photographer and take some photos of plenary speakers, social events and other scenes of interest.

Rich Pitkin, software Engineer, TConsult

I’ve been a software engineer since 1995 working in the defence industry, but have recently joined the family firm and I’m now the company’s Head of Technical Services. My role covers a lot of different areas, but my main focus is developing iPhone apps. I also provide support for the other members of TConsult which sometimes involves supporting my wife at conferences by providing live streaming or video recordings of talks and post production.

Rich is the husband of Kirsty Pitkin, our excellent event amplifier. Rich will be helping us with all things video, including streaming and filming vox pop videos.

JISC has announced a HEFCE funded programme designed to help prepare the sector for increasing demands on course data. Information about the call is available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities.aspx

All eligible institutions are invited to take part in Stage 1, by submitting a letter of commitment (deadline 12:00 noon UK time on Wednesday 7 September 2011) signed by key senior staff, in order to receive £10k of JISC funding. For the full call document, including details of an online briefing about the call to be held between 15.00 and 16.30 on Tuesday 19 July – go to http://goo.gl/nv6ec.

Eligibility:

Letters of Commitment may be submitted by Higher Education (HE) Institutions funded by HEFCE. FE institutions in England that teach HE to more than 400 FTEs are also eligible to bid providing involvement in this programme supports the HE in FE agenda. HE and FE institutions in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are not eligible to bid.

Stage 1 funding of £10,000 is available for all eligible institutions which submit a Letter of Commitment which provides evidence of support from Senior Managers responsible for Teaching and Learning, Marketing, Management Information Systems/IT and the institutional course web sites.

Relevance for IWMW

Increasingly those involved in the provision of institutional Web services are finding that their responsibilities are going beyond the provision of quality information related to institutional activities to providing access to data related to the institutional activities.  The importance of data for those involved in the provision of Web services is being recognised at the IWMW 2011 event with a DevCSI workshop on “Open Data and the Institutional Web” beginning on Monday 25 July, the day before the start of the IWMW event.  This event, which is free to attend, is aimed at both developers and those with an interest or responsibility for institutional data who may be looking for ways in which such data can be reused.  If you would like to attend please complete the online booking form.