Linden Lab has the most awesome company meetings and here’s a pic to prove it, originally uploaded by Torley.
The Web Advisory Group convened last Thursday for a conversation about the status of the “Reboot” and concurrent priorities, as well as a discussion on social media in higher education.
The conversation was the most animated when I introduced challenges to some long-standing perceptions of what the group colloquially referred to as “The Web Office” should be doing, and for whom. It was a snappy and productive and mutually-respectful dialogue, and I think everyone left the meeting with newfound understanding and respect for the challenges all of us front on a regular basis.
The slideshow below encompasses some of the highlights, especially those concerning new directions for “The Web Office.” In the interest of focus, I excluded the part about social media. I’ll save that for another day.
Please take a careful look.
And always, your comments are most welcome.
Thanks!
Ken George
Office of Marketing and Communications
You mention better alternatives for the event calendars – I suggest a Google Apps solution using Google Calendars. They’re easy to use, easily sharable and reliable.
Web clients always looking for easy-to-manage freebees of course. The free google calendar worked very well for the 50-year old Chit Chat Lounge in Haverhill, MA.
http://www.chitchatlounge.com/goocalendar.html
Google Apps is too mundane, union needs to be original and innovative, like it claims to be. However, Union also needs to emulate better schools (no offense). Notice that Harvard and Yale do not use Google apps…..
NO MORE MEDIOCRITY
Thank you both for the comments.
We are currently exploring a wide range of event calendars. Google offers some intriguing options, but I suspect in the end we will settle on an alternative.
Union Prof: “No More Mediocrity” is our cri de guerre!
Thanks for the comments.
Ken George
Marketing and Communications
an argument for google calendar:
programmable and standard API
I’ve worked with ics format and the goolge API, it is very simple. If you really want to be unique, build a custom frontend, but a google calendar backend would be extremely desirable. It is free and in active development. It will be much easier to mantain.
Since it is about web presence, not just union.edu, google calendar makes a lot of sense. (Public calendars I can add to my own calendar through google calendar or through an .ics exported form)
Union does not have enough ingenuity to create their own tailored calender?
Why mooch off of Google and other pre-fabricated apps? Sometimes the “easy way” is not always the best way, and it shows.
Union should design their own stuff instead, and be proud of it!
Developing a bespoke calendar is a difficult task. It is a difficult task to create a robust design that is easily extendable and easy to integrate into other systems. It is a difficult task to properly document it. Google has done the work for that. When it is time to migrate it or develop a new feature, it will be much simplier with a google backend.
You don’t have to use the pre-made google javascript components, you can write a custom one of those, but use google as the backend.
A google backend is much more future-proof with minimal maintenance cost.
One of the problems I have right now is it seems everything on the domain is bespoke, and these are often expensive to mantain and integrate. If we don’t use google, we should use another standard calendar backend – something with an API!!!
Dave: Thanks for the very thorough analysis of Google and calendars. Rest assured your very well considered points gave us plenty over here in the office to think about.
Nott: I think Dave answered your question.
Ken George
Office of Marketing and Communications
[...] “Meetin’ Time” October 26, 2009 Slideshow on the status of the “Reboot” and new directions for the “Web Office.” [...]