Often Messy. And Occasionally Glorious.
From Big Glorious Mess, a new blog you should bookmark:
When I was trying to come up with a snappy title for this blog using the words ‘University’ or ‘Higher Education,’ nothing seemed to capture the amorphous challenges that we wrestle with as web people in the college setting. The concept of making websites for a university is like grabbing a handful of pudding. It’s not HTML anymore. It involves building coalitions, exploiting technologies, using vendor applications, open source and social tools, herding a collection of web presences spanning servers both on campus and around the world, identifying content contributors and subject matter experts and thought leaders and so on. It’s simply hard to explain. When someone asks me what I do, I usually mutter, “computers,” and then we change the subject and start talking NCAA sports or how nice it is to raise kids in a college town.
But get a bunch of us web folks together and we will go one endlessly (and with great enthusiasm, angst or passion) about the challenges, novelties and wonders of building web stuff in this setting. We have the privilege of working in a field where we are daily exposed to the oddest and most dynamic collection of pursuits imaginable. Today we’ll meet a dog therapist in the veterinary school. Tomorrow we’ll talk with a researcher who climbs three hundred foot trees. We’ll work with poets, artists and genetic engineers doing freaky-cool stuff with animals and plants. We’ll get to know incoming students who are leaving the farm for the first time and outgoing students who have traveled the world. We’ll hire interns ostensibly to do grunt work and populate databases but who will end up doing important and amazing things that make us jealous of their abilities.
And we’re expected to build a website, or series of sites, that serve them all.
And we must do this while dealing with a fickle public who finances our existence via grants and gifts, tuition and appropriation, leaving us little room for planning or forward thinking despite the fact that our jobs require leaps of imagination and daily wranglings with the latest technology.
Working in the web field in higher education is a big, big undertaking. And it is often messy. And occasionally glorious.
Now I’ve got to go videotape a dog getting therapy at our vet school. See you later.
Big Glorious Mess is a new feed on my reader. Only 3 posts so far, but all of them (like above) are great. I’m particularly interested in the blog because the author (like me) is a web guy working under the Advancement umbrella, specifically in Communications.
Several months ago i attempted to describe why I like my university job, but his explanation hit real close to home. Well said.
