Web working

Thursday June 23 at 3:14, I was in an IT (Information Technology) meeting talking about our new web pages. Even though almost everything on our campus is back to normal, thanks to massive vaccination and booster policies, and also a robust "mask – friendly" policy, we still met virtually, seeing one another as a little boxes in a larger screen. It was easy to see that many of the people were paying attention to email or other tasks as the conversation was going along.

Web presence is an interesting sociological phenomenon in its own right. On the one hand, it makes life so much easier: if I want to know a store's hours, or the correct spelling of the word "flouted" (o, not a), or figure out the title of a staff member on my campus, the web is a handy, go-to reference guide. On the other hand, it seems like we're always hiring consultants to design new web systems, maintaining a staff of experts to help support our web system, going through trainings on how to design and manage webpages, etc. The existence of the web has created a new, costly infrastructure burden that didn't used to exist, and that we can't shrug off.

And so, as I think about my dean-ly activities related to internal funding, external funding, and research compliance, I'm trying to figure out the best way to reconstruct or restructure a good web presence for us, to make other peoples' lives a little bit easier going forward.