© University of Reading 2011 www.reading.ac.uk
Directorate of External Affairs
April 10, 2023
The web cooperativeEducating and enabling our colleagues
The web cooperative
Me – Helen Setchell
• Doing ‘web stuff’ since early 90’s
• Head of Web and New Media @ Reading
• Manage the Digital Development team within the Communications Office
• (Help manage a band – lots of digital fun!)
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Today
11:00 – 11:10 Introductions
11:10 – 11:20 Governance and senior management
11:20 – 11:35 Your ideas
11:35 – 11:45 The central team
11:45 – 12:00 Your ideas
12:00 – 12:10 Staff outside the centre
12:10 – 12:25 Your ideas
12:25 – 12:30 Conclusions
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You
• Name
• Institution
• What do you want out of this session?
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Before we start…
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The serenity prayer
Give us the courage to change the things we can,
the serenity to accept the things we can’t,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
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Governance
• How do we educate and enable senior management so that they can govern the digital presence?
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Some things to try
• Refer to strategies
• Engage in consultations
• Contribute to policy and frameworks
• Submit papers to committees
• Produce dashboards
• Meet with deans, heads of schools, directors
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Barriers to change
• The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.-- John Maynard Keynes
• The greatest difficulty in the world is not for people to accept new ideas, but to make them forget old ideas.--Tom Peters
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But…
• A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.--Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Process barriers
• A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.--Sir Barnett Cocks (in New Scientist, 1973)
• If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.--Charles Kettering
• Too often new ideas are studied and analysed until they are suffocated.--William Pollard (The Soul of the Firm)
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But…
• It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.-- Grace Hopper
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Hierarchies as barriers
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But…
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Language barriers
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But…
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Exercise 1
• Your ideas on how you can educate and enable senior management so they can govern the digital presence
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The team
• How do we educate and enable ourselves so we can deliver the digital presence?
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Some things to try
• Get feedback from internal customers
• Review team remit and job descriptions
• Enhance skills and/or retrain
• Review and remodel processes
• Catch-up regularly with other teams, e.g. IT, Marcoms, Design, Procurement, faculty-based ‘web’ teams, eLearning, Student Records, Library, Staff Dev, etc
• Delegate sideways
• Measure success
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Exercise 2
• Your ideas on how to educate and enable your team to deliver the digital presence
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Other staff
• How do we educate and enable everyone else so that their contributions add to the quality of our digital presence?
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Some things to try
• Identify and tap into existing training
• Develop new training based on demand– Drop in and learn
• Start a digital development forum
• Steward some communities of practice/practitioners, e.g. CMS supporters, system managers, AV enthusiasts, social networkers, mobile geeks
• Create guides, tip sheets, project packs
• Involve students
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Overload!
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• It used to be simple, and then… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEwzDydciWc
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But…
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Exercise 3
• Your ideas on how to educate and enable everyone else so that their contributions add to the quality of our digital presence
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Conclusions
• Governance
• The team
• Everyone else
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