Jul 17, 2007: Wikis and Academic Content Management

On Jul 17, 2007, I presented a talk to the Caltech Webmaster's Forum on academic websites -- websites for academic divisions, departments, research groups, individuals, projects, etc. -- and the role wikis can play in supporting them.

Abstract

I've been working at Caltech since 1995. In my time here, I've worked in as an IT professional in a research lab, for an academic department, for an academic division and now for the central computing organization. In 1995, having a web presence was mostly enough for most organizations, no matter what that presence looked like or how useful it was. Beginning in the early 2000s however, organizations at all levels at Caltech began to realize that their audiences had developed higher expectations and that a usable, information rich, well maintained web site would be an organizational asset, perhaps conferring strategic advantages on them in the form of increased recognition (leading to collaboration and grant funding), a greater attractiveness to potential faculty, and higher quality or simply more graduate students.

Today, in 2007, those organizations realize that the people who possess the knowledge in an organization should be the ones to communicate it to the organization's audiences, and yet across Caltech they have recognized that building and maintaining usable, attractive websites is difficult and beyond the skills of most or all of their members.

In this talk, I presented brief personas of the people who are typically tasked with maintaining websites, and discussed the usability of wikis in relation to those people. I then detailed a taxonomy of academic websites found at Caltech and discussed the applicability of wikis to them.