Doing things differently
One of the best things about The Gateway project is the briefing document that was given to me by the university – to create a web based platform that encourages students to develop a sense of readiness for opportunity. This brief captures the central premise of my work, to use the WWW as a medium for reflection, self-awareness and discourse.
A fair amount of time has passed since that initial meeting and several key developments have taken place. We now have a small team in place – an wee army of enthusiastic people who are really committed to the project at an ideological level. There is also a consensus that in order to achieve what we have set out to do, we need to do things differently. So we are examining the various relationships that the website has to facilitate and eventually how the intended audience of students, academic staff and external agencies will use it.
Given my love to think in sets of 3 and equations (not sure why) I came up with a sitemap concept which was quite well received by everyone at the university. Why not make the intended relationship explicit through the primary navigation – students + businesses = opportunities, and then use the secondary level navigation to define the various levels at which we want this relationship to work. I really enjoy this sort of narrative building through navigation, and I’ve found that most people relate to it.
Anyway, coming to the point of doing things differently. When we sat down as a group and discussed the navigation framework, we started thinking about the actual relationships and trying to facilitate them through the website. This led to a very interesting discussion about sourcing content, which is where we came up with some very interesting suggestions. Now I cannot go into the details of what we discussed (for understandable reasons) but in brief, we have introduced yet another parameter – collaboration. Looking at the development and maintenance of the website as a collaborative effort. Of course there is tremendous precedence for such a concept, the entire social media movement. But given the fact that The Gateway is a university project and will be hosted on the university server, we definitely don’t have that level of freedom to just throw caution to the wind and ask students to take over. This is why we are currently working on a model of whereby we can come up with collaborative contracts – get students onboard and make them stakeholders, so they have a say in the important decisions related to the Gateway. Again, I shall not go too much into the details, but as you can imagine, this is quite exciting. I shall endeavor to keep you posted of any exciting developments.
Tags: enterprise education, university projects, york st john
