© 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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h

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But…

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h

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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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