Time and time again I get this feeling that lots of people in higher ed have their head buried in the sand. People fail to realize that many of the things they do and resources they create can be useful and time saving for others. It seems like everyone wants to tackle every project on their own level when there asset might be helpful to people all the way up the chain, (ie department > college > university) or whatever hierarchy you have. Not only is this a waste of time but a waste of money, lots of it. And at a time like this we should look to eliminate this waste.

From when I came to this job I realized lots of sticking points when dealing with people from other areas, there is always a hesitance and a sort of hoarding mentality. Which I don’t understand do the the fact that “we are on the same team”. I think people feel threatened by buying into the greater good which is unfortunate. I have always attempted to be the first to support and give buy in to university wide projects and extend things I have developed to others in the community. I guess I have a sort of grass roots or open source mentality. I always prefer to give up what I have done with no strings attached.

A few of the things that I have recognized time and time again are:

• Events calendars
  People recreate the wheel time and time again with this one, i think if at all possible calendaring should be a university wide project rather than one tackled on a department level. One unfortunate thing is that in my quest for more than three years now I have never found a calendaring system that does everything I want. A few features I would look for tagged events that can be aggregated at multiple levels, RSS / iCal and Microformats.  Notable open source ones VT (Virgina Tech) Cal but that project has been dead in the water. Cal Berkeley / Nebraska Lincoln cal are based on the same framework but they have pretty heavy code for a non developer like myself and they lack a great mechanism for the hierarchy of events. Last but not least Bedework, very promising, still an active open source project but just not perfect for me
• Campus photo archive
  This is one that I feel is very neglected in many cases every department simply had a huge hard drive or cd’s that have the same photos over and over again. They are organized by at best a folder structure that doesn’t really communicate what they have or enable finability. What I would advocate is some sort of a flickresque at least in function if not using flickr system that has tagging, easily accessible to all, ability to put large image, geotagging, licensing if need and possibly even a rating system. This might be a larger problem than just images I think asset management for images, video, documents, etc. could be handled in much the same way. At a university there are certain things like the football stadium, basketball arena, academic building, and the student union. The list goes on and on, but these places are of interest to all students and deparments. These pictures would be useful to communications / marketing people in all departments and a tool like this would be a great way to manage your universities abundant resources.
• Content management system (CMS)
  This is a huge undertaking of a project but when done well it can really help. Higher ed content management runs the gambit of flat html with no file management, small cms systems that are run on a departmental level to large enterprise cms’s that can handle entire universities web presence. One the the best bits of knowledge I have learned from all the cms demos I have attended is that for a large or decentralized university you will need something way more than lets say a drupal or a wordpress. You will probably need a decoupled system this means a system that is programming language agnostic where people can still use their own resources and servers. For example there would be a central application server that would handle content, user management etc. But they then tend to push out a flat file to each depts own server. Therefore, what ever language a department uses be it php, asp, ROR whatever they are able to provide hooks in the flat files and still use their languages. Another gain is that is the CMS server goes down every site at the university doesn’t go down with it. I could go on for hours about CMS’s but I will leave it at that. Hopefully people will buy into this, some think it will take away their job but I see it as using resources to free up my time to work on other stuff.
• News system
  This is one that I see as being very similar to the calendaring system. There are assets “news” in this case that may need to be leveraged at the (department > college > university) level and it is great when you can use some mechanism, lets say “RSS” to pull all these together in an aggregated format. It cuts down duplication. PR people don’t have to send press releases in email all over the place.

So in closing I hope you think about who else could benefit from your work and how you can benefit from others because we are all able to make each other look good and save money while doing it.