Category Archives: jisc

Specialist or generalist? Digital comms in 2012

jisc, thoughts

Ann Kempster kicked off a really interesting debate over on her blog this week with a post titled And or neither nor: press and digital in 2012 [to be fair the title is the only clumsy bit of the piece!].

The post and the comments [so nice to see comments really being used to expand on the topic - seems so rare these days!] discuss how best to integrate digital into an active press team and whether we have reached the point yet where digital skills are just part and parcel of the job or is there still a role for specialists taking care of that side of things.

In this age of ‘digital by default’ it is an interesting topic and there really are some insightful comments covering all sides of the debate. The role of the Press Office in Departments and local government is clearly well established and was already challenging in a pre-digital age so there is some reluctance in some quarters it seems to take on this extra responsibility – even if it is becoming harder and harder to ignore.

In my little corner of NDPB-land it all tends to have a slightly different tone. The largest Press team I have ever worked with is three people (that is now) so I tend to always think in terms of Communications teams rather than just one [very busy] corner of things.

I was lucky enough to spend many years working for an organisation that was ‘digital by default’ years before Martha even considered dipping her toes into civil servant infested waters and have also worked in teams where ‘digital’ & in particular social media was seen as something of a fad that got in the way and would blow over. I know which one I preferred :)

The very nature of JISC [at the time] meant we were encouraged to experiment and the team embraced a pretty strong ‘digital first’ ethos across the board. I was very much a cheerleader for the possibilities of social media at the time but the way it got embedded into so many aspects of communications back then and then evolved over the years into the amazing portfolio of outputs they have today had nothing to do with me and everything to do with a team of people willing to take a bit of a leap and challenge the traditional boundaries of their roles.

Currently I find myself for an organisation slowly starting to engage more through digital and we are doing it in an integrated way. It isn’t my little digital team leading the charge – we are supportive and making sure guidance, tools and platforms are available to use – rather the drive is coming from editorial and policy people. It can be slow going as by nature we are a risk averse organisation but I think the fact it isn’t my lone voice calling for change has made the case stronger. The fact we are far from an early adopter also means lessons are there to be learned from and as always I’m thankful by how willing people are to share those lessons.

I guess what I am getting at is that where I have seen it work best is where thinking about digital isn’t the preserve of one or two people but rather is spread amongst the majority and the web/digital team does what it can to facilitate this and make sure getting on-board is as frictionless as possible.

*BUT*

This takes time – even in smaller organisations – and it is important to remain patient, identify supporters and pick your battles. The recent BIS Digital Day was an inspired idea for spreading the digital world and encouraging people throughout the organisation to think about digital in a different context. With the work from GDS filtering through to the bosses and initiatives like that at BIS empowering the ‘grassroots’ then the cultural changes many of us have sought for so long finally have a chance..

Revisiting the BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles

jisc, work

Back in 2007 I arranged for Tom Loosemore to give the closing keynote at the JISC conference.   At the time Tom was Project Director for BBC2.0 and it was a classic case of inviting someone because I wanted to hear what they had to say :) In my opinion it was a great talk (and while there was a bit of grumbling from those who would have preferred *another* edtech talk it scored pretty well on the feedback forms so it all worked out ok!)

Tom structured his talk around the BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles and I took alot from those slides (including the list of ‘principles’ bluetacked on the wall by my desk for a couple of years). In the last couple of days I have seen them mentioned and/or linked to a couple of times again so I decided to revist them myself and see how helpful they were four and a bit years later especially as I am currently writing a digital strategy.

Turns out they are still pretty spot on. Mention of ‘Second Life’ dates them a bit (remember when that was the ‘future’..) but I actually agree with all of them as general principles still but have cut it down to 10 for my wall this time.

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards.

2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly.

3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.

4. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.

5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site

6. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.

7. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

8. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all:Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.

9. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users

10. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site

To one extent or another I think my proto-strategy addresses all of these to one extent or another but I am going to spend a little time sense-checking my current ideas against them as soon as I can.

As it turns out Tom Loosemore is now ‘Deputy Director, Single Government Website at the Cabinet Office’ which basically means he is running the Alpha/Betagov project which has the potential to influence my working life more than anything in the last few years.

Thoughts on the HEFCE Review of JISC

jisc

So the long awaited (well by me anyway!) review of JISC by Sir Alan Wilson was published this week. To be honest I was expecting a little more noise from my corner of the web about it – alot of people have been conspicuous by their absence as far as discussions online are concerned and while I understand that JISC employees are probably choosing to stay tight lipped I remain surprised that so many others are as well.

Before I comment on the Review I guess it is worth stating my relationship with JISC for the record. While I am no longer an employee and haven’t been for several months now I do remain a close friend of many JISC people both within the Executive and the Services. I also continue to believe that JISC are a *good* thing and while I don’t always agree with their direction of travel (in fact sometimes I am downright befuddled by it) I believe they do important work.

There were a couple of things I liked about the report. The idea of a more powerful ‘board’ backed by advisory committees with no actually financial responsibility rather than the current sub-committee structure seems like a step in the right direction. I’ve tended to think the way the sub-committees work(ed) has become a bureaucratic impediment over the years and has made it difficult for the organisation to act with the agility and pace it needs to in order to really be innovative – alongside this I’ve never really been convinced it added the ‘collegiate’ community aspect that was the intention either.

The general theme of simplification is also really a no-brainer. I’ve been involved with JISC pretty constantly since 2003 in a variety of roles and have a pretty good understanding of what goes on there but at no point would I have said I really grasped the full scope of what was happening – or really even came close. Thing is I bet I’ve got a better understanding than most despite that.

Less Services isn’t going to be easy but I think it is probably a good idea – many of them provide interesting or useful products or guidance but how many of them have the kind of audience or impact that justifies them? Not enough I’d suggest. I’d love to be proved wrong though.

Something I am neutral on but find intriguing is the idea of JISC coming out from the safety of HEFCEs coat tails and becoming an independent organisation. In many ways this seems to represent a real opportunity – especially the idea of perhaps bring things like Collections and Janet back into the fold for a kind of SuperJISC. That said losing the protection of HEFCE is risky and the idea of becoming a membership organisation would be a difficult transition (as well as step on the toes of ALT, UCISA, SCONUL etc?).

There are two elements of the review that I had an immediate and lasting negative reaction to though.

One is the idea that JISC funds too many small projects and should consolidate funding into fewer larger pots. I personally think this is wrong headed in the extreme! I accept that these smaller projects are hard to recruit for at institutions and sustainability is an issue but at a time when even the UK Government is seeing the value in the concept of skunk works and building small, innovative project teams it seems foolhardy for JISC to move away from this model. I’ve always felt that alot of the cultural change that JISC seeks to implement comes about by the constant seeding of these smaller projects and the groundswell they create rather than the top down approach of influencing senior managers who for the most part just don’t get what JISC is pitching.

Related to this is the idea that JISC funding should be focused on the current concerns of institutions (evidenced by things like the UCISA list). I understand where this is coming from but I also felt JISC should be identifying potential solutions to tomorrows problems not todays.

Finally the thing I felt most uncomfortable was the seeming dismissal of JISCs support of the ‘open’ agenda as being ‘controversial’. This smacked of publisher influence and made me a little sad.

In all my time at JISC is was the commitment of the organisation to this wider agenda that I was always most proud of. The founding of OSS Watch, the work with people like Creative Commons, supporting the uptake of open standards, the hugely successful OER work and of course the ongoing work around the Open Access movement made JISC, in my opinion, hugely important players in these vital issues (which I tend to group together in my thinking about the ‘open web’). The need for a strong advocate on these issues is clear – publishers and vendors have been holding institutions to ransom in recent years and JISC has worked hard to combat this. Any ‘horizon scanning’ which didn’t have this as a key element would fail the higher education and research communities as far as I’m concerned.

So many of my beliefs about the (open) web were founded during my time at JISC thanks to the opportunities I was given and the amount of doors that were opened up to me just by being a member of JISC that I’ll always be supportive of the organisation no matter what direction it goes in but I think my support would wane considerably if ‘open’ was off the table.

Leaving JISC

jisc

OK – this isn’t the ‘leaving interview’ post I promised – not yet anyway. It is written and at some point soon I will publish it but I want to revisit it a little first before letting in out into the wild.

Anyway today is my last day at JISC. Actually I am writing this in an empty office in my last 30 minutes at JISC listening to some Issac Hayes.

I first joined JISC in 2003 as a Web Editor. Over the years I picked up more responsibilities before originally leaving in late 2007 to take a secondment at HEFCE – at the time I had every intention of returning. As it happened I didn’t and I ended up spending 18 months split between freelancing (Fail), Becta (Fail) and Jiva (good times!) before returning to JISC late in 2009 for a year long contract.

From a work point of view JISC will always be my ‘home’. I feel I’ve been lucky to work here, made some great friends over the years, worked with some extremely clever people, learned a huge amount and got to stretch myself and implement many a semi-crazy idea.

As it happens I found my most recent role a struggle at times. This didn’t stop me learning a load again and getting to work on some great projects but it wasn’t a great fit for me and much as I’ll miss working here I won’t miss that job much! The team I worked with were great and I’m glad I got the opportunity to get to know them all better and see just how hard they all work and how committed they are to achieveing something important.

I look forward to taking all the lessons I learned at JISC with me to my new job and hopefully making a few less mis-steps this time around.

So anyway this is a thankyou to every JISC related person I have worked with, met at conferences, chatted to on Twitter or just shared a beer with.

Cheers! See you around (well on Twitter anyway :) )

[JISC] Weeknote 33/33

jisc

33 weeks of constant blogging has been achieved – the best unbroken run of my blogging career and it worked even better than I hoped as a way of getting me thinking and identifying other things to blog about. It is also an interesting record of my year in the JISC Innovation team to look back on in the future.

As it happens my maths were a little out and I have 10 more days at JISC – so it should have been /35. That said I am going to draw the weeknotes to a close now. I haven’t decided whether I will start up again at the MRC – I don’t know their feelings on this sort of thing yet and I’ll need to get a feel for things first. Also it is becoming clear that I have more to say often about my side projects so maybe the focus needs to shift there.

I have written a post that is sort of a ‘leaving interview’ – well if I interviewed myself – that I will publish on the 15th October. It looks back at the last 12 months and is pretty honest I think.

This week the focus has been getting the Briefing Day sorted – and I think that is looking good. I visited the venue today – it is a bit Hogwarts in places but I reckon it is going to work well. Also I continue to have a series of ‘handover’ meetings as I try and justify and explain what I’ve been doing this last year so someone can pick up the few things left.

The team is releasing a pretty sizeable call for funding document on Monday which includes an explanatory briefing paper which I had the pleasure(?) of reading through and giving some feedback on. One section on Identifiers for web pages was actually pretty interesting to me as I retain a bit of fetish for well formed URLs – the whole human readable and hackable aspect of them anyway (I am less interested actually in the Persistent Identifier for everything aspect that is so important to Linked Data which I guess is a surprise to noone given my history of being unconvinced by LD..)

Had a couple more signups to Bettr and next week will give it a big push – starting with the launch of the new, Evenstreams powered, website and news of the Learning Without Frontiers discount offer. I’m going to ask some of the speakers to push things out via their channels as well.

Eventstreams is looking amazing – the feedback we have had so far has really helped simplify things and Stefs work has been amazing. I’m going to have to slow down my involvement for a couple of weeks once I start at the MRC just to free up some headspace but I am very proud of what Stef has built already and it is only going to get better.

I was also very pleased to get my first blogpost done for the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival – I’m hoping to get at least four more done before the Festival starts and then a couple during and after.

Today I am in London just sorting out a last few things – it will be my last visit to the London office which does feel a little weird. I’ll be heading off for a couple of beers at the tiny Savoy Tup in a bit and it will be weird coming to London and not heading for the Strand (or Centre Point) in the future.