27 27-29 July 2004 Starting at 11.00am
University of Birmingham Birmingham
Tickets were £325 (including 2 nights' accommodation) Event over!

About The Workshop

This year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop took place at the University of Birmingham on 27-29th July 2004. The theme of the workshop, the eighth in the series, wasTransforming The Organisation. The talks, parallel sessions and discussion groups addressed the issues of how the Web may be transforming our institutions and how our institutions’ working practices and organisational structures may need to be transformed in order to make best use of the Web. In addition many of the more mainstream issues facing Web managers were addressed.

The event provided an opportunity for those involved in the provision of large-scale institutional Web services to hear about institutional case studies, national initiatives and emerging technologies and to actively participate in a number of parallel sessions.

Programme Committee

Members of the Programme Committee are responsible for the content of the workshop. The committee members represent a cross-section of the Web management community.

  • Brian Kelly, UKOLN (Chair of Programme Committee)
  • Ian Upton, University of Birmingham (Local Organiser)
  • Tracey Stanley, University of Leeds
  • Catherine Ewart, PPARC
  • Stephen Bulley, London School of Economics and Political Science

Organising Committee

Members of the Organising Committee are responsible for the organisational and financial aspects of the workshop.

  • Natasha Bishop, UKOLN (Chair of Organising Committee)
  • Sarah Smith, UKOLN
  • Brian Kelly, UKOLN
  • Ian Upton, University of Birmingham (Local Organiser)

Workshop Topics

Plenary Talks

The following plenary talks were given.

  1. Trials, Trips and Tribulations of an Integrated Web Strategy
  2. E-business: Why Join In?
  3. Socrates: Building an intranet for the UK Research Councils
  4. Beyond Web Accessibility: Providing A Holistic User Experience
  5. Beyond Free Beer: Is Using Open Source A Matter Of Choosing Software or Joining A Political Movement?
  6. Life After Email: Strategies For Collaboration in the 21st Century
  7. LSE for You: From Innovation to Realism and Beyond
  8. Strategic Staff Development for the Web-enabled Organisation

On the morning before the event opened there was an optional Introduction to JISC and the Web Community session

Parallel Sessions

Workshop session A

  1. Defining the Role of the Web Editor
  2. Developing an E-content Strategy for your Web Site
  3. Blogs & Wikis: Herding Cats?
  4. Using your Ayes and Noes: Creating a Business Case for an Institutional Portal
  5. Paper Prototyping in Practice
  6. Give The Dog A Plone
  7. Measuring the Impact of a CMS Implementation
  8. Integrating Legal Compliance into Web Management

Workshop session B:

  1. It Always Takes Longer Than You Think (Even If You Think It Will Take Longer Than You Think)
  2. Implementing Web Standards Across The Institution – Trials And Tribulations Of A Redesign
  3. Taxonomy: The Science Of Classification
  4. From Swipe Card Machine to the Computer Screen
  5. QA For Web Sites – What Goes Wrong And How Can We Prevent It?
  6. Cheesy And Sad Images
  7. Being Open Source
  8. Choosing a Search Engine for your Web Site

Evaluation

In an event report published in Ariadne, issue 41 Tracey Stanley described how:

The 8th Institutional Web Management Workshop provided an entertaining mix of new ideas, challenges, controversy and debate, this year in a Birmingham setting. The sub-title for the conference – Transforming the Organisation – was well chosen. The Web is now ‘mission critical’ in all of our organisations, and the workshop gave us all ample opportunity to reflect on how the Web is transforming our organisational and working practices and changing every aspect of our professional lives.

Event Summary

Location: University of Birmingham

Date: 27-29 July 2004

Length: 3 days

Cost (including 2 nights accommodation): £350

No. of plenary talks: 9

No. of plenary speakers: 11

Gender ratios: 8 M (91%) and 3 F (9%)

No. of workshop/BoF sessions: 16

No. of workshop facilitators: 24

Gender ratios: 16 M (67%) and 8 F (33%)

No. of participants: 157

Total length of sessions: (1.5+4)+(3.5+4)+3.25=16.25 hours

Delegate contact time: 16*157= 2,512 delegate hours

Evaluation: Ratings  for content and organisation not available.

Special features:

A wiki (Seedwiki) was used to support the event for the first time. In addition delegates were invited to create a FOAF profile.

An optional “Introduction To The Web Community” session took place in the morning of the first day.

A narrowboat trip took place on the second evening.