Almost Live from HigherEdWebDev 2007: Building a Cohesive Website through a Collaborative Process

The conference is now over, but Dimitri, one of this year’s guest bloggers has sent a few more posts about interesting sessions including this presentation by another guest blogger, Seth Meranda, and his colleagues from UNL.

What happens when you bring open source philosophy to your campus redesign? Success, according to the team presentation by University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Bob, two Aarons, Brett, and my fellow guest-blogger Seth delivered a sizzling-hot recipe at this year’s conference: take one part chancellor’s buy-in, one part spirit of collaboration, commonly found in open-source projects, and one part stoic patience. Gently fold in elbow grease, and generously sprinkle with evangelism mixed with political diplomacy. Cook it for a year, constantly stirring.

What you get is a self-sustaining institutional Web presence ecosystem that is irresistibly attractive to even the staunchest rogue
university entities. With enough foresight built-in by utilizing Web standards and encouraging presentation/branding elements reuse, this ecosystem is also highly tolerant to change. This is probably the most important facet that takes it to a whole new level compared to your typical redesign efforts: by bringing together all developers across the campus through a well-defined, open collaborative process, it allows improvement through continuous evolution of the Web presence, rather than making painful start-over leaps every 5 years.

Let’s not underestimate the talent of the core team. These guys did everything right: they started with the chancellor to get a strong supporting hand. They created Web Developer Network and kept the process open. They used democratic process to gather and select (by online voting!) template designs. They used the leading-edge CSS, XHTML, and Javascript techniques to build kick-butt accessible, beautiful templates. They implemented change control and synchronization system to reach out to individual developers. They came up with a consistent, documented quality assurance process to approve and publish sites, as well as the style guide to help developers make it right the first time.

Quite frankly, they created a process that does not fight individual departmental developers, but lets them innovate through collaboration instead of getting bogged down reinventing the wheel.

Enough with pithy words. Go look at their site (http://www.unl.edu/ and http://www.unl.edu/webdevnet/). You’ll be impressed. I certainly was.