August 12, 2008 Webmasters Committee Meeting Minutes

Present: Jamie Bethel, Jill Lenz, Sallie Varner, Larry Cobb, Merry Wright

Jill Lenz, Chair, started the meeting at 9:05 am

Old Business

1) Proposed Webmaster Committee charge update
2) Updates on Don Zimmerman and Carol Borchert

New Business

Monthly meeting time or location change due to EH conference room scheduling conflicts.

Not on Agenda:

Merry Wright asked Anthony DeNardo from ACNS to give a brief overview of videoconferencing at CSU.
He told us that H.323 is the set of protocols that governs videoconferencing connectivity and that an H.323 device marries video, audio and data and sends it over the web. Almost any device can be part of this - for instance, a web cam is a piece of an H.323 system. Contact Anthony to use CSU videoconferencing and visit the following website for more information http://www.acns.colostate.edu/?page=videoconferencing.

Old Business:

Jill reported her attempts to rewrite the committee charge have been unsuccessful to date and she would like more feedback from the Webmaster group.

She asked us: What roles should we have in the college? At what level do you want to participate (individually)? What things would we like to do, as the committee and what membership is appropriate? She said some people have expressed a desire for more authority and some backup from the dean’s level.

As a preface to the discussion, Jamie said that pages that are "branded" probably won’t change in their design and asked what Square I is going to do. They will write the code for the redesigned college pages based on Don Zimmerman’s findings related to menu structure and they will also write a content management system or will recommend one. Carol Borchert and Jill are working on policies for how the content will be managed. Until that’s settled, the rest of the project can’t move forward. Carol Borchert has discovered from conversations with stakeholders and the dean’s office, most seem to want the same look to pages – the question is how far down within the site. This hasn’t been decided.

Jamie said this reminds him of the RamCT methodology. There is a structure for overall content and that’s provided and then individual content for the classes is up to the teacher. He also commented that content providers have to have a policeman – who is that going to be? Who is going to enforce the standards? Not everyone is responsible, so who’s going to check the content for compliance and accessibility? Larry thinks the cadre of people who will execute the policies should be the members of the committee. Given that there may be a constituency that wants to contribute and doesn’t have a committee membership, would we suggest standards to individual constitutes or would standards be issued as an edict, he asked.

Jill said one way we could do this is to have the same chair for the committee and suggested that as the project manager for the redesign, she could remain as permanent chair. Larry said the committee now has more of the flavor of a steering committee and that we need, from an external source, direction and input related to the trajectory of the project. We’re trying to develop a set of questions to be written down, laid out and taken up the hierarchy for their approval and buy-in so standards can be enforced. He thinks this committee’s experience can help Jill formulate those questions.

Jill would like the 4 departments to do something like meet separately to decide the design of a page, for instance a faculty page. Committee members could help to decide video standards, editorial writing standards, the types of pages that Square I will code for the redesign. Larry asked if Jill thought committee should originate the pages or review the decisions made by Jill, Don and Carol. She said she thought the committee would act as a reviewing body.

After lengthy discussion, we decided that rewriting the charge now might be an incomplete process. We lack information and there are many activities in various stages of planning or execution. Jamie suggested we update the charge now to reflect a function as a steering committee, date the change now and then revisit/rewrite it again in a year or so when things have developed further.

All agreed and Jill will rework the current committee charge to reflect this decision.

New Business:

There is time/day conflict with a class that must be videotaped in EH 120. We will move the time of our meetings to 10:30 – 11:30 on Tuesday for the next 4 months.

Meeting adjourned at 10:16 am.

Minutes submitted by Merry Wright.

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