HELIX Conference - March 25, 2004

The Missouri Higher Education Web Developers met at the HELIX conference Thursday, March 25, 2004. We had representatives from at least 9 institutions, which was wonderful!

Web Track

We discussed how the web track at HELIX was something we thought should continue. Sara mentioned that it was hard to get presenters to fill the track. Everyone agreed to either develop a presentation or solicit presentations from others. It was mentioned that some of the web sessions overlapped with each other and with the users' group meeting. Sara promised to contact the HELIX conference staff to see if this could be avoided next year.

Open Discussion

We discussed content management systems as many institutions were either implementing or considering one. Three systems mentioned were Carnegie (hope that's spelled correctly), Contribute and Typo3. We also briefly discussed cascading style sheets, security and privacy. If anyone has resources about these systems, please send a message to the group.

Next we talked about training opportunities. Sara mentioned that WebDevShare, which was a popular conference at Indiana University-Bloomington, is moving to the University of Rochester. Limited information is available at http://www.highedweb.org This move is happening because the program committee of WebDevShare is working with the University of Rochester. You may also hear about a WebDevShare track at CUMREC, but the WebDevShare program committee is not heavily involved with this CUMREC track.

Future of Missouri Higher Education Web Developers Group

The group decided to formalize the Missouri Higher Education Web Developers group. To that end, we elected officers. Shelly Brown, Southwest Baptist University, was elected Chair-elect and I was elected Chair. Shelly and I were tasked to develop by-laws, which we will then distribute to the listserv for comment. We decided to hold elections each year at the HELIX conference. (Update: Shelly has started to work on the bylaws.)

We also decided to see if we could become the Missouri Chapter of a national higher education web developers group, possibly HighEdWeb if they become a national group. (Update: Sara has contacted HighEdWeb to see about this possibility.)

We also noted that we need to find funding to send mailings about the web track at HELIX and recruit presenters. We'll be exploring possibilities in the next year.