Web Steering Committee Minutes
April 12, 2001
Attending: Steve Butts, Steve Hirby, Jim Evans, Pete Gilbert, Ruth Lanouette, Andrew McDuffee, Michael Thorp, Nancy Truesdell
The meeting began just after 3 p.m. First on the (non-printed) agenda was the need to pick a mutually acceptable time for regular meetings, and we chose to meet at 3 p.m. every second Thursday for the remainder of the term: April 26, May 10, May 24 and June 7.
Second was the discovery of those items that would need attention during this period. They were determined to be:
- The job description for a webmaster proposed by the Web Working Group. The Committee agreed that we needed to take some action on this proposal soon. Whether we could usefully forward a request for a new position without specify-ing its location or to whom its occupant would report was discussed and we de-termined that such decisions, while usefully informed by our recommendations, were beyond the Committee's scope, and therefore that we should take action on the content of the proposal rather than on its administrative context. A discussion of the document and what we should do with it was placed on the agenda for the next meeting.
- A Request For Proposal draft, also proposed by the Web Working Group, for ex-tramural help in fashioning an extensively revised website for Lawrence. This too is on the agenda for the April 26 meeting.
- A request from Mr. Cameron Kramlich of The Lawrentian for our assent to his engaging the services of College Publisher, Inc., to provide web-related services under contract to the paper. After some discussion the Committee decided that both the general relationship of the paper to university and the wisdom of such an arrangement were beyond our purview, but that the proposal for an online pres-ence for The Lawrentian separate from the official LU website did not violate any of Lawrence's established web policies and that we had no grounds for objecting. The Committee also determined that under current practice the Lawrence website could have reasonable links to that of the paper.
Other issues that were mentioned included the need to review our budget, the promotion of web usage by faculty, a policy for ADA-related web accessibility standards and what kind of formal connections to other campus technological bodies we should have.
Professor Evans reported briefly on the current state of the Internet II and our possible relationship to it, and passed out an updated list of those institutions eschewing participa-tion in the Yahoo wired campus survey.
Stephen Butts, Secretary Pro tem