28 28-30 July 2009 Starting at 1.30pm
University of Essex Colchester
Tickets were £350 (including 2 nights' accommodation) Event over!

About The Workshop

The call for submissions described how:

This year is the thirteenth Institutional Web Management Workshop. It could be argued that both the Web and IWMW have been through a number of changes since their conception and are now in a transitional stage between childhood and maturity. The teenage years can be a bit of a rollercoaster ride; some of the areas for concern include:

  • Mood swings – What about our love hate relationship with CMS? Are there tensions between the web user and the Web site creator?
  • Attempts to assert ones own identity – Have institutions finally addressed the ownership of content? What about merger of services? How do institutions engage with third parties? What effect will cloud computing have on institutions?
  • Interest in current fashions – Are we being led by applications? Are some of the newer Web 2.0/social networking tools just fads? Can they really enhance learning and teaching and institutional Web services?
  • Joining of cliques – Are there cliques within Web services team? Is it a case of marketing and communications over technical aspects (such as design and development) or can teams unite? Is being part of a crowd important?
  • Lack of money – Has the downturn had an effect on institutional Web sites? What can be done on a budget? Is this a time for consolidation or should the downturn provide the impetus for innovation?

Sponsors

The sponsors for the IWMW 2009 event were:

  • TERMINALFOUR: sponsors of the delegate bags, badges and lanyards
  • Jadu: sponsor of the workshop dinner

Exhibition

The event featured a small exhibition. The exhibitors were:

  • Activedition
  • Chameleon Net
  • Siteimprove
  • Squiz
  • TERMINALFOUR

IWMW 2009 blog

An IWMW 2009 event blog was published. As described in the blog:

There had been 8,617 views of the blog according to the WordPress.com statistics up to 1 July 2010. Up to this date there had been 68 posts published and 97 comments made.

Workshop Content

Plenary Talks

The following plenary talks were given:

  1. Headlights on Dark Roads
  2. Servicing ‘Core and Chore’: A framework for understanding a Modern IT Working Environment
  3. Making your killer applications… killer!
  4. What is the Web?
  5. Hub Websites for Youth Participation
  6. Agile Prototyping in Academia
  7. Lightweight Web Management
  8. How the BBC make Web sites

Parallel Sessions

Parallel session A:

  1. Exposition, Cliffhanger, Resolution
  2. Using The Social Web To Maximise Access to Resources
  3. Practical Blog Preservation
  4. An Introduction to WAI-ARIA
  5. Are QR Codes simply a fad or do they add value to the mobile user?
  6. Another step closer to a CMS – dallying with Plone
  7. Who does what on the Web and how?
  8. Mashups Round the Edges
  9. Hands-on prototyping for (meta)data structures

Parallel session B:

  1. The Anti-Portal: mashup and forget it
  2. Using Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  3. Using Scrum: Sprints not Marathons
  4. “Where’s the University?”: building an institutional geolocation service

Parallel session C:

  1. The Mobile Web: keep up if you can!
  2. The Invisible Repository
  3. Time for iTunes U
  4. Twittering Techniques
  5. Care in the community… how do you manage your Web content?

Streamed Strands

Based on previous feedback a small element of streaming was introduced to the workshop. The streaming took place on the day 2 (Wednesday 29 July) afternoon. The two strands concentrated on different areas of Web management. The Front-end strand is more marketing, communications and management focussed while the Back-end is more technically focussed. While parallel sessions took place for the back-end strand plenaries were taking place for the Front-end strand and vice versa. Delegates could only pick one parallel session for Wednesday afternoon. When they are not attending their parallel session they were available to attend the plenaries taking place.

Developers’ Lounge

A developers lounge area was provided at the event.

Evaluation

Kirsty McGill provided a live blogger’s perspective on the IWMW 2009 which was published in the Ariadne ejournal, issue 61 on 30 October 2009.

In the article Kirsty described how:

The 12th annual Institutional Web Managers Workshop (IWMW) attracted nearly 200 delegates, making it the largest workshop in the event’s history. Whilst the popularity of the physical event has grown, so too has the remote audience. So this year organisers Marieke Guy and Brian Kelly decided that it was time to start treating this remote audience as first class citizens.

That’s where I came in. As live blogger, my job was to amplify IWMW 2009; providing a live commentary via Twitter on the dedicated @iwmwlive account, blogging on the IWMW 2009 blog, uploading video interviews and co-ordinating all the online resources via a NetVibes page to give the remote audience a more complete experience of attending and to create a digital footprint for the proceedings, complementing the fantastic live video streaming provided by the University of Essex. In this report, I will give a summary of the event as a whole, together with observations about the successes and challenges of co-ordinating all the digital output from an event with experimental formats….

Event Summary

Location: University of Essex

Date: 28-30 July 2009

Length: 3 days

Cost (including 2 nights accommodation): £350

No. of plenary talks: 8

No. of plenary speakers: 10

Gender ratios: 10 M (100%) and 0 F (0%)

No. of workshop sessions: 18

No. of workshop facilitators: 23

Gender ratios: 75 M (83%) and 6 F (25%)

No. of participants: 197

Total length of sessions: 3.5+(3.5+3.5)+3.0=13.5 hours

Delegate contact time: 13.5*197= 2,659.5 delegate hours

Evaluation: 4.5 out of 5 (content) and 4.3 out of 5 (organisation).

Special features: There were a number of new features at this year’s event including a Developers’ Lounge, a series of barcamps, a quiet area for those wishing to avoid inclusion in photographs and live video streaming, and front-end/back-end strands for some of the plenaries. We also used Ideascale to gather suggestions for the event content.