Privacy concerns are central to the good stewardship of any online, non-news communication.
Luckily, most of these can be quickly resolved by answering this simple question: “Did this person give me specific, prior permission to publish this personal information?” If so, if they knowingly opted-in, and you’re golden. If not, you’re not.
An opt-out option, after the fact of being published, never meets a best practice standard. No matter what the intention.
Back in my Windows NT/2000 server admin days, we’d occasionally receive a large package in the mail from our server vendor. Those of us in charge of the servers would set the package down on a table in the break room and eye it with fear and loathing as beads of sweat formed on our brows. For we knew what the package contained - something potentially (and usually) really awful. It was called a “Service Pack.”
A Service Pack was a kind of upgrade that was meant to “correct” and “patch” many problems that Microsoft seemed to feel existed in your currently adequately, painstakingly tuned servers. Of course, it would also install some new goodies that would make life for the Windows admin much, much easier.
Well, the last time I was involved in a Service Pack upgrade, it just broke the entire server. I don’t mean it blue screened or spewed forth some hideous kernel core dumping message. Oh no. I mean the machine stopped working, as in it wouldn’t turn on after the install. I don’t miss those days.
The recent Keeneweb/Wordpress upgrade wasn’t quite so catastrophic, but it sure wasn’t ideal, either. We’ve managed to fix some of the global bugs but there are bound to be others, especially with the visual editor. By all accounts, this upgrade package was poorly developed, and the WP community isn’t happy about it.
But, this is what we have to work with, and hopefully we’ll get most of the bugs worked out as we go forward. So if you see any bad things happening to your site, let us know. We’ll do our best to make it right.
I’ve added a link on the home page to the online giving form. It links directly to the form — next week Evan’s going to tweak the form so that the form provides a link back to the general stuff if that’s what the user wants, but for now they are thrown right into the thick of it:
The blogging workshop turned out to be a huge success, with about twenty people showing up (I’m horrible at estimating headcounts, so feel free to correct me there). The questions were good, and the feedback I’ve gotten since the presentation has been positive.
The goal of the presentation was to show the variety of uses for blogging/WordPress, and we were successful in that.
It’s interesting that Keene State is pursuing Web 2.0 more through the staff than the faculty at this point — but I think it’s promising too. People showed up to this seminar because they know that blogging can help them to be more effective in their jobs. I like a crowd like that, because if you can solve their problems they become powerful evangelists.
Here is a list of sites we looked at the blogging workshop:
We will be upgrading our Wordpress Multi-user software from v1.3 to v1.5.1 sometime next week, probably Monday morning. Upgrading WPMu tends to be a bit of an adventure and sometimes things can happen, so your blog may be down for a bit during the upgrade. This upgrade includes some new features (like a multi-file uploader) and security and bug fixes.
We’re soft-launching Keene and After — the new alumni social networking site. We started today by sending out 113 invites to the Class of 1988 and watching closely what happened. So far we have a signup rate of about three percent — which is a little depressing. Since these emails represent alumni that for the most part have volunteered their addresses I was hoping for a higher initial rate — somewhere around 5 or 6%. We’re going to try to vary the message, the delivery, and other factors and see if we can get the rate up. We get higher click-throughs on things like Newsline (12-15%) off that same list, and I think a lot of the differential is trust — when people are asked to “Sign up” for something they leave — whereas reading something like Newsline is low-commitment.
If anybody is reading this post who is an alumnus who hasn’t got an invite, there’s no need to fret. Just shoot us an email at webmaster@keene.edu and we’ll send out an invite right away. The slow-launch is so we can watch the site carefully as it grows and make course corrections, but if you want on *now* we’re glad to have you…
More as our saga as it continues over the next couple of weeks.
Update (May 14): We hit 5% this morning (6 signups). More interestingly, we had two signups through friend invites, which is indicative of how important that viral invite element is: 25% of the users who signed up yesterday were not on the email list. This is one reason why the invite lets people know we won’t use the information to solicit them, or the people they invite. That’s just so incredibly important.
As you may know, we’re gearing up to launch an Alumni site using Ning, a “personal Facebook” type of software. The first email invites are going out today.
Well, not exactly the first invites. And therein lies a story.
See, before I launched this, I tried a little experiment and invited a few of my alumni friends to a prototype site. The site grew by leaps and bounds until it reached 31 members, most of them not invited by me. Many invited by people not invited by me.
There were postings, reconnections, forums. For that period of time people were addicted, clearly stopping by the site obsessively. From February 13 to March 20, it was *the* place to be.
Then suddenly — not so much. I mean *really* not so much. Everybody disappeared, almost overnight.
There’s a number of reasons, I think. One being that initial activity was heavily about reconnecting and once new people stopped coming in, the site died. Another being that at thirty-one members, the site was just too small. The people that post the majority of content in things like these seem to number about one or two in a hundred — at 31 people, the flow of content was too unstable. (At Blue Hampshire we got well over a thousand members, and 600 readers a day, but the site is still dependent on 12 or so regulars who post).
I also think that a lot of times you set it up to have this explosive activity, but after the dust settles if you did it on a large scale you’re left with your regulars. So some amount of contraction is expected.
Still, I can’t help thinking of that Annie Hall quote about the shark (first 10 seconds of this trailer):
Do online social networks have to keep on moving forward or they die? It’s definitely something we’ll be looking at as we launch the alumni site.
To try to mitigate it we’ll be experimenting with how fast we send out the invites, and we’ll be trying to encourage participation by setting up forums and prodding people we know to contribute. I’m sending out 131 emails today to the class of 1988 — and watching closely what happens. Depending on the response we could add people more slowly of quickly than planned…
We have a new addition to our office — Evan Young, who comes to us via the Development Office.
Evan is a generalist who developed expertise in Datatel while working at World Learning in Vermont. While the number of Datatel projects we have going while consume most of his time (especially the Benefactor to Colleague conversion which will consume 50% of his time) we hope use and develop his other skills as well. For the time being, he will be flat out on the remaining elements of the Alumni Services Portal and the Alumni Social Site. More on that shortly…
The latest issue of Newsline is up. Commencement is front and center, but the monthly journal also talks about our student team’s EPA award, LEED certification for Pondside III, the KSC 100 blog… and the sad news of the passing of Kate Phillips, a former professor of mine.
Here she is in a small clip from a 1937 film:
One story I’ll share here about Kate, because she deserves it… I had her as a professor in 1989, during a semester where I was quite lost in terms of what I wanted to do. Or actually, I was lost in terms of college, because I had decided to become a folk singer and move down to Athens, GA — so schoolwork was just not a priority.
Kate asked me why I wasn’t showing up for screenwriting class when I obviously loved screenwriting so much, and I explained that I was quitting college at the end of the semester to pursue my dream. She told me that if I loved music I could do music on the side, and I’d enjoy it as much, or more. She said to trust her — she’d been there and she knew.
And more than anybody, there was just a depth of understanding in the way she said that to me, so cheery on that Spring day a couple weeks before finals.
Everybody I knew tried to talk me out of quitting school. My parents. Many friends. All my professors.
And I did it anyway. But the only person that really made me reconsider going, just for a day, was Kate. As things went from bad to worse in Athens, I’d think back occasionally on that conversation on that day. In fact, I occasionally still do. I can remember the bright room in Morrison, the rustle of the trees, and most of all, the feeling that when she told me that I didn’t have to play life as an all-or-nothing game that she really knew what she was talking about.
Looking at the obituary in The New York Times, and at her IMDb list, it becomes just how apparent that she really did know. She succeeded at being a star and a screenwriter. And then she decided to succeed at being a wife, a mother, and a teacher — and to do that, she voluntarily left her previous success behind her.
She was so incredibly content with the choices she had made in life. She put her heart into what she did, and never stopped laughing.
I’m a little late on posting this, but the catalog has been launched. There’s no major new online features here, really just a laborious transcription of the paper catalog into HTML, and our standard reimagining of some parts.
It’s interesting — when I first got here we were recoding every catalog from scratch, and it was a process that took a month of effort and was fraught with error. The second year I was here we introduced a “diff-doc” process, which drastically cut production time for the policies and programs sections, and last year we moved the courses out of the db, and into flat pages, because the idiosyncracies of courses being called multiple things and appearing under multiple courses was getting a tad baroque — people thought not in terms of the course database when designing the catalog, but in terms of the paper catalog. So we drop the pretense of that there was some underlying generative structure for this thing, and just went to straight HTML pages — and people loved it.
So now that we have this process *down*, what happens? Well, next year’s catalog will be an online only version — and that’s going to take some serious reworking of the production process.
It’s a classic example of how things work over here — no project or process online is ever really “done” — it’s only awaiting it’s next iteration…
