W3SC minutes
13 February 2003

Attending: Steve Butts, Steve Blodgett, Peter Gilbert, Nancy Truesdell, Joe Gregg, Jim Evans.

1. Ms. Truesdell and Mr. Gilbert reported on WWW issues discussed at the most recent meeting of the Enrollment Committee. That committee is interested in encouraging the creation of good websites for academic departments and offered to assist the process. In discussion there, the recommendation was to show the design of the new site to the departmental liaison representatives in that narrow window between the time when we have enough of the site built out to excite them and show the new features and how they might use them, and the time when it will be too late in the academic year for them to do anything. We determined that this time was near the end of April and beginning of May, and this, perforce, becomes our first major milestone. Meanwhile, departments are urged to update and fix their current sites to make conversion easier. Enrollment offered to "bird-dog" this effort, and our Committee gratefully accepted.
2. Mr. Gilbert reported that Intercollegiate Athletics wishes to have a direct link to their homepage appear on the very top LU homepage. After some discussion we decided to defer a recommendation on this issue until a time when more Committee members were present and could be consulted.
3. Someone (your faithful correspondent forgets who - perhaps Ms. Truesdell?) asked how the Committee would examine and approve the many and various technical decisions to be made as committee subgroups and those doing the actual work to create the site moved forward. We felt that considerations of efficiency dictated that the working crew have considerable latitude in effecting the design and that periodic updates for the Committee and consultation with affected parties, for example, the Dean of Students when relevant pages were being built, would be sufficient.
4. Near-term activities: the next two weeks or so should see
   1. tweaking of NetCasters' pages to make sure they work and look as intended;
   2. Work toward a decision on a platform and other technical issues, and thinking about training and documentation;
   3. Mr. Butts making a call Bambi to urge her to complete and send the remaining "deliverables" called for in the contract;
   4. Creation of the detailed directory structure required for new pages;
   5. Elaboration of naming conventions and the formal project plan.
   Since it is clear that we must begin move from talk to action, we agreed that the Committee will not meet next week (February 20) give that time to those members actually doing work on the project. Members are requested however to keep the Thursday 1:30-3:00 p.m. slot open for future talk.

Stephen Butts, Secretary pro tem