LSCR Director’s Blog
One of the things we’ve been hearing from folks in L&S is that LSCR doesn’t communicate enough; that we’re quick to respond when they call us, but we don’t do enough to tell people about what’s going on in technology in the industry and on campus. Part of the reason for that is that to communicate via our web site or email is fairly time-consuming for us. Before we’ll put up a post on our web site, we want to be sure it’s correct and complete, which requires us to spend time developing the content, and then going through an editorial process before a page can go live. For a lot of our content, that process is important; for example, our Thunderbird pages couldn’t be published until we were sure Thunderbird was going to be our email client recommendation, and we’d developed enough content to be worth making an announcement. (And really, we still haven’t made a formal announcement about Thunderbird, because as soon as we do that, people will want to know when we’ll be migrating them, and we’re still working on our schedule for that. The short answer is: within the next six months).
We need a communication mechanism that has a better signal-to-noise ratio than email (what percentage of your incoming email did you actually read today?), but less formality than our web site. Fortunately, technology has already helped us out with this one; blog software is easy to install and use (we’re using WordPress), and it’s easier to be informal in a blog context. Plus, the ability for readers to add comments can create an open dialog that saves everyone from having to ask the same questions over and over.
I’ll be posting news, announcements, and random thoughts about computing in L&S on a regular basis. Pretty soon (once it goes through our editorial process!) we’ll have an advice article on how to subscribe to blogs using RSS, which can keep you updated without the notices getting lost in your email.
We’re also planning to offer blog space to any departments who use our server for their web site; if the department chair or IT manager wants a blog, it’s easy for us to add a new blog to fit into your existing web site.
