I commented on Ryan Jacobs blog about this the other day. Here is an excerpt…

Internal conferences like WatITis help to expose innovation occurring on campus, but more needs to be done. The communication channels at uWaterloo are often ad-hoc and ineffective; mailing lists just serve to annoy. I know quite a few people who pipe mailing lists directly to a sub-folder they never review. But what is the answer? Staff at uWaterloo are very busy due to the hiring freeze, do they have time to participate in social communication? My hope is they will make time if a better format exists, we just need to discover it.

We all know that communication is important and make strides toward that goal, but is it enough? I certainly won’t be surprised when the “we’re already doing this!” comments roll in, but my point is I haven’t heard about these things.  The new Waterloo Be Engaged initiative is a great step for a key issue, its goal is to create a community surrounding student engagement. Time will tell how effective the approach will become, but I like it so far.

On the Information Systems (IS) side I am keeping my ear to the ground for similar efforts, but at the same time I am thinking of ways to help. The current mailing lists don’t really seem to be working and committees are not communities. Will forums work? I’m not sure, but it is worth a try to get things going. We are working on building a forum at web.uw for web involved staff to converse and I am hoping to summarize monthly reports from the result.  I envision the reports being posted to the mailing lists and given to interested committees such as CTSC and WAC.  Time is an issue and reading is the first thing to go when the ToDo list becomes unmanageable, but if anything this would be a start.

I am very interested to hear your opinions and any other ideas you might have!

I’ve long been bored by UW’s brand image. Our web Common Look and Feel (CLF), while minimalist and consistent, is very boring. It is the result of a designers struggle against the input of a committee. The CLF allows some flexibility in terms of navigation and colour but is essentially a mostly white, box layout. Over the course of this year I plan to tweak elements of the UW brand while working on a new sub brand for a large project. Mostly these tweaks will be experiments with what is possible, some will be ridiculous, others ugly and a majority just plain amateurish — I am no artist. I hope however to get people thinking about how to break out of the box and build a strong UW brand on the web without just making everything the same.

For my first experiment I decided to take on the UW crest — check any link above for the original. The CLF features it very prominently on every page in the top left corner. It is both a brand mark and a quick link back to the root UW homepage. Recently the logo had a makeover, the almost primary yellow was swapped for a more eye friendly version and the red was deepened. This both prints better on physical paper and doesn’t grab hold of the eye immediately on page load. However the crest is still just a flat colour boring image so I figured why not attempt to give it some life and depth. I wanted to make it look as if it was an artists representation of a fictitious real version that could actually exist somewhere on campus behind glass.

I wonder how much that solid gold shield weights?

Firstly, Toronto is a nightmare to try and navigate if you need anything more than a simple subway trip or single bus route. Have you ever pulled up the PDF bus routes map from the TTC website? It is a rats nest. Additionally the TTC has one of the worst transit websites that I have ever seen and I wouldn’t trust them further than I could throw a trolley car to improve it. If Google is able to integrate TTC and GO Train data it would make navigation in Toronto as easy as breathing. Perhaps that is slightly exaggerated but you get the point.

Secondly, students who are looking for Off-Campus housing here in Kitchener/Waterloo would have a much easier time of learning the route they would need to take everyday instead of trusting landlords to tell them or having to figure it out from the GRT website. I would certainly be integrating walking directions into our Off-Campus housing and Sublet systems.

I wonder who I have to pester to get GRT, GO Transit and the TTC to open up their routes to Google.

It is always interesting to see all the first years and their parents. It seems that the parents are attempting to control their kids lives to a later stage and it seems like the kids are letting them. I’ve read an article or two that speaks to the same findings. Parents are calling up universities in droves trying to do all the work for their kids education that for certain the kid should be doing themselves. Also is it just me or do parents get angry really fast if things don’t go the way the want? “Do you know your sons student number?” “NO!, Why the F*** would I know that!” “We need it to bring up his information” “**grumble**, **swear**” (Under breath)”You son might know it if you let him talk.” Sigh. The last two years everything has gone so smoothly its scary. We have techs just sitting around waiting for something to do.

The return of fall means the return of the Parkour scene to Waterloo. It was also going in the summer but for some reason I was pretty lazy and didn’t get out much. This year we will have a whole new set of frosh joining us and learning, it should be a lot of fun. If your interested keep an eye on the forums on pkto in the Guelph/Waterloo section for meet times and locations.