Wednesday, December 16, 2009 - Needles Hall (NH) 3001
Present:
Lara Babalola, Marta Bailey, Janice Cooke, Mary Lynn Benninger, Michelle Douglas-Mills, Sarah Forgrave, Chris Francis, Guillermo Fuentes, Eva Grabinski, Chris Gray, Marlon Griffith, Adam Hewgill, Karen Jack, Janet Janes (Guest), Pat Lafranier, Tammy Marcinko, Paul Miskovsky, Kris Olafson, Kevin Paxman, Wendy Philpott, Terry Stewart (Chair), Evan Truong and Jonathan Woodcock
Absent:
David Bean, Don Duff-McCracken, John Kemp, Lauren Harrison, Jaymis Goertz, Jim Johnston, Geoff McBoyle, Isaac Morland, Kelley Teahen, and Sean Van Koughnett
1. Chair's remarks
There will be a "Planning for a Content Management System (CMS)" Webinar in Math and Computer building (MC) 2009 on Thursday, December 17th at 1:00 pm. (Action: Pat L. will send an email to the UW-web mailing list).
Eva forwarded the latest proposed accessibility legislation via e-mail to WAC members. Web accessibility legislation will be a further discussion at afuture meeting.
The January 20, 2010 meeting will be dedicated to the web redesign with White Whale Web Services attending the meeting.
Math will be sending a representative to rotate with Jim Johnston. Tom Service has been added to the mailing list for WAC.
2. Minutes of November 18, 2009 - Approved
3. Branding initiative (Sarah Forgrave)
Kelley Teahen will report on the Branding Initiative at the next meeting. Sarah emailed the information regarding the Gotham font. It is free for use on any University of Waterloo owned (University of Waterloo IP address) computer; it cannot be download at home. The font should not be used on web pages except embedded into Flash or created as a graphic. Because it is a commercial font, there is currently no way to protect it if used in HTML documents.
4. Web redesign project (Sarah Forgrave)
White Whale Web Services has been awarded this contract. White Whale has top-notch credentials and has been involved with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Southern California (USC) and other high profile universities in the USA. The five-member company will be on campus the week of January 18 and will meet with WAC on January 20. This company's complement includes programmers, an artistic designer, project management experts and the like. Kelley is working to schedule times for White Whale to meet with Meg Beckel, David Johnston, student groups, faculty groups, WAC, etc. There will be an open forum on January 22 from 11 am to noon for anyone who misses a meeting or wishes to have more discussion. This is an opportunity for WAC to have input into the web redesign on topics such as functional requirements, design requirements, navigation, etc. The door is wide open.
5. Policy on advertising on University of Waterloo web pages (Karen Jack)
The sub-committee is scheduled to meet in the new year and will bring back the draft policy with the suggested changes from the previous WAC meeting. If necessary, a second meeting can be held in January or February.
Terry reported that he had had input from Alan George about advertising on the web. There should be no problem displaying sponsorship logos for organizations that provided funding or services for an event. There should also be no problem with a faculty member who wants to put a link to a commercial vendor (such as Amazon) for a book s/he authored. The faculty member should not, however, have an order form for the book on his/her personal web pages. Athletics is still possibly an issue. Terry Stewart will be speaking with Bob Copeland. Executive Council is keen to see a policy. If a policy can be agreed upon, it may be necessary to grandfather some sites like Athletics.
6. Waterloo Content Management System (CMS) (Eva Grabinski)
Open Text Web Solutions training has been completed: Project Management - Management Server (5 participants); Project Builder - Management Server (20 participants); Server Administration - Management Server and Delivery Server (1 participant). The goal is to have the software acquisition complete by December 18, so that installation can start immediately in the new year. The team is comprised of 30 members from across the University and is listed on http://www.web.uwaterloo.ca/
Key deliverables and work include: * Internal expertise in the CMS (via training and pilot) * System architecture requirements definition and set-up * Application architecture requirements definition and set-up * Pilot website plan, design, development, testing and launch * New web-design implementation in the CMS * Accessibility-compliance configuration and testing * Training and support plan (documentation and courses) * University rollout plan (plus content migration strategy)
The pilot website will be a central Waterloo Website Resources website - housing and pointing to University web resources for University website creators and maintainers. The planning for the pilot website will start in January 2010 beginning with content needs assessments involving web developers/programmers, web designers, content authors/editors, and training & support specialists.
7. DNS Resolution Policy Sub-Committee (Terry Stewart)
Adam Hewgill volunteered to replace Jim Johnston on the DNS sub-committee. Terry suggested that the sub-committee re-constitute and start from the beginning. Terry and Bruce Campbell did meet and have a history of the discussion. Apart from discussing issues around DNS resolution (e.g. who gets a domain name when more than one unit wants the domain name), there were two other issues for the sub-committee to discuss: * Website URLs: As we move forward with a CMS, should URLs be of the form: http://www.faculty.uwaterloo.ca/ or http://www.uwaterloo.ca/faculty? Or should a department within a faculty be: http://www.faculty.uwaterloo.ca/dept or http://www.dept.faculty.uwaterloo.ca/ * Generic domains: For clarity purposes, should we recommend being more specific with domain names? For example, http://dean.uwaterloo.ca/ should probably be http://faculty-dean.uwaterloo.ca/ The subcommittee will take these issues under consideration as well.
8. Waterloo YouTube Channel (Sarah Forgrave)
Sarah is putting the finishing touches on the Waterloo YouTube Site (http://www.youtube.com/uwaterloo). Individuals from each unit will be appointed to approve the suitability of the playlists. Filtering for uploading will be similar to the events approval for University of Waterloo Events and it most likely will be the same individuals approving the YouTube submissions. The specs for videos are on the introduction page (e.g. file limits are 400Mb). The intention of this site is for the use of lectures, promotional materials, speakers, events, student submitted content, etc. The guidelines will be drafted once the YouTube site is up and running, with the intention to develop standards in future.
YouTube captioning is built in and there is a simple way to upload the captioning.
Kris is already working with YouTube captioning and will bring this back to the committee at the February meeting.
There may be a need for a social media strategy. Marketing and Undergraduate Recruitment and CPA have hired Kayleigh Platz to begin writing. Kayleigh is also co-teaching the SEW Course, Introduction to Social Media, with Sarah.
9. Web Technology Standards (Chris Francis)
Chris pointed out that there are no published practices or policies on what technical standards we are coding for. For example, what browsers and versions of browser are we programming for? What versions of HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Javascript, Java, XSL, Flash, etc. are we using and supporting? *Discussion:* * Should such standards be and are such standards being considered as part of the CMS project? The Waterloo Web Resources pilot website stemming out of the CMS project was mentioned. * WAC does have an opportunity to discuss and advise on web standards for the University. A sub-committee should take this on and regularly review standards that are in place and under consideration. * We should be focussing on technologies we want to use and not necessarily be relying on third-party guidelines. * Some of the coding standards for web design should come out of the web redesign project (e.g. HTML, CSS). This input could be discussed with White Whale when they visit in January. * Many web technologies are moving targets with standards hard to pin down. While some standards remain consistent over periods of time (HTML, CSS, accessibility), many web technolgies change rapidly without there really being any consistent standards. There should not only be a list for the consistent standards, but a forum as well to discuss what others are building and using at the University to address quickly evolving web technologies. Chris Francis and Marlon Griffith have agreed to look at this further. If anyone else is interested, please let Terry know.
10 . Other business
a) Organizational and Human Development (OHD) Staff Training and Development
Some webinars are free, while some have a registration fee. Pat approached OHD regarding a lump sum of funding assistance for WAC several months ago. We have heard back that there will be no special dispensation for WAC. We will have to apply for each activitiy individually. This makes it difficult to use this for funding because the process is too long and we often have short notice about an activity like a webinar.
b) Upcoming Web Courses
Preparing Your Web Content (for the CMS and redesign) - January/February 2010 SEW Course * Introduction to Social Media - January/February 2010 SEW Course * Writing for the Web - March/April 2010 SEW Course
11. Next Meeting - Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - 3:00-4:30 pm - NH 3001
*Meeting adjourned - 4:30 pm*
-- TerryStewart - 21 Dec 2009