I’m hoping for a resurgence in news editors, and it seems very possible. A local writer, editor, and commentator of some sophistication will publish what was, in the 1700s and before, a subscription broadsheet. She will allready be an engaged citizen, reading all the local media deemed relevant, especially from nontraditional sources (blogs, Youtube, Twitter, Craigslist, Facebook, mailing lists) as well as governmental reports and the remnants of the local newspaper. She will analyze the news, make some fact-checking calls, and send it out to her subscribers, who are willing to pay $1 or $0.50 per [unit of time] to not have to filter everything. This won’t replace the social process of surfacing news, and it won’t be a full-time job, but it’ll make coherent reports possible in small civic settings where even a mass of participants cannot volunteer the energy to keep the interested informed.
http://thinkdetroit.blogspot.com/
The UROP program at the UM helps place students with professors in great research settings. I’ve gained a lot from my project.
Unfortunately, they also feel compelled to run a mandatory side program for all participants. It’s an insulting waste of time. Here’s an email I got yesterday:
Hey Scholars-
On Wednesday, we will be having the annual UROP Career Fair. The social sciences portion of the career fair will be held in the Dennison Building. There will be two session: 6-6:45 and 6:45-7:30. You are required to attend AND SIGN-INTO both. I have attached an Excel file with each of your names and the two rooms you are required to report to. Please let me know if you have any questions.
IMPORTANT: please write down the two room numbers of where you’re required to go b/c there will be a lot of people there. If you don’t sign-into both, you will not receive credit for attending. Sorry.
-Doug
Hampel, Matthew: 413 Denn 232 Denn
What will happen in those two rooms is a mystery. Good bye, 90 more minutes of my time.
Breaking news: CTools does not have an HIG document.
(raise your hand if you actually were surprised)
I wanted to think out loud about the information architecture of the RC site. Probably not interesting to you, but a valuable exercise for me, and I don’t apologize.
It’s bad right now, for many reasons.
One is that since everything is in the left column and not well delineated, you get a nasty mess of links once you’re a couple levels down in the site. And that nasty mess exists on every page — it’s not pulled from a template.
But what really irks me are the large categories. I wasn’t a part of the initial design process, but it looks like some misguided notion of personas was pushed. But this isn’t a strict B2B site or intranet where all users have well-defined roles. Prospective students want to know what classes the RC offers and what groups exist, as do alumni, staff, and friends; but that information is, illogically, all under “current students”. And “about the rc” is found under “prospective students”. Arg.
I’m not in a position to completely rewrite those categories yet, but a stab in the right direction would probably look very traditional:
- about
- academics
- rc life (players, benz, )
- rc community (gallery, PALMA, SLIP, urban org)
- alumni
- calendar / news
But with cleverer nouns.
Even that raises problems; where does EQMC go, or internship listings?
Where to put the top-level navigation is even trickier. In the end, it’ll go up horizontally at the top. That seems inevitable. But then we’ll have another Cornell / UChicago / Community High. Boring! (but usable?)
Don’t get me started on the file structure — it’s flat, and everything’s in one folder. That’s actually a good thing, as we get ready to move to a platform that supports a large amount of open source software — there’ll be less fiddling to do. At the same time, it means that (with some grunt work) we can reorganize the navigation — without worrying about moving files into different folders, which would break links and cause a whole different set of problems.
Craig sends it an email like this:
“Matt will update the photos and captions on the homepage by Tuesday. Here are the files he needs: [attachments]”
And I get an email right away (and whenever else I want) that says:
“Update the photos and captions on the homepage by Tuesday. Here are the files: [attachments]”
There would be a project page where I can log in and check all that stuff, since I lost all those emails and then turned off notifications for a week.
When I’m done, I just send it an email saying,
“I updated the homepage. Took 1 hour. Craig now needs to find new photos for next week”
And the system knows what I’m talking about.
