Wednesday 27 July 2011

IWMW Event 2011: Responding to change

The IWMW Institutional Web Management Workshop is being held at the University of Reading this year and i've finally managed to make it to one! It's currently day two and the Embedding Web 2.0 plenary has just finished. The event seems well attended and it's given me a great opportunity to finally meet some of the people I have only spoken to via Twitter!

The sessions yesterday were very good, I managed to get myself into the Parallel Session entitled 'Content silos and how to overcome them'. This was all based around how best to improve working across all faculties and departments. The key points that came out of it were that there needs to be better ways of sharing content so, clear tagging, good metadata, well structured site and workflows. Luckily we seem to be putting all of those in but it was interesting to hear feedback from other universities who aren't! Some of the people I spoke to yesterday had a huge number of sites, project sites and faculty content all in different CMS's and running different designs which sounds like a complete nightmare!

The key points from yesterdays sessions were broken into a number of heading but the two that stuck in my mind are:

Editorial
  • You need to have strong editorial guidelines
  • Bear in mind the audience, channel and media relevance
  • Go in heavy on the metadata & tagging
Governance
  • Clear ownership of content is needed
  • Workflow rules should be in place
  • Regular content audits are essential
  • Carry out regular survey & user feedback sessions
  • Taxonomy
A good starting point for breaking down the silo mentality apparently!
So, day two is well under way and it's almost time for the Online Privacy talk. If you wanted to get an idea of what is happening during the day you can follow the hashtag #iwmw11 or check out the website:

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