pad ready for amsu web ideas
In December I volunteered myself for the Association of Managers in Students’ Unions (AMSU) web development team – with a healthy shove in the right direction from Jaki Booth (trustee of AMSU). It’s a voluntary position and there’s three of us altogether who will be meeting to help AMSU develop its web presences and putting our plans into action. It’s a voluntary position.
I travelled down to Birmingham on Thursday 29th January not really sure what to expect. I knew there was a rough agenda ahead of us (discuss how crap AMSU’s old website had been, what was happening with the NUS Extranet and AMSU and potentially discuss some new ideas). Arrived at Birmingham City University Students’ Union to join in the #bcutweetup and then my fellow volunteers arrived on the AMSU web development team.
The first is Andy Parsons, chief executive at Loughborough Students’ Union, and the other is John Wordsworth, representation and democracy manager at Exeter Guild. So north, south and centre were combining to see if our collected minds could figure out the best way for AMSU to progress on the web.
The laptops were flipped open, the wireless eventually connected (I was borrowing Jaki’s laptop) and Andy fired up his ace MindMap sofware (John and I massively impressed by this, no wonder Loughboroguh is consistently rated as one of the top Union’s in the UK!).
We started out by describing what we thought AMSU itself should be – a place for all staff in Students’ Unions, not just general managers/chief executives – to find resources and the opportunity to explore new ideas and share best practice.
We discussed what we were up to at our respective unions with respect to the web, and it was amazing all the stuff that’s going on (from John handcoding an elections voting system at Exeter, to me starting work on an elections interactive facebook application and Andy enjoying the benefits of Warwick Union’s MSL system).
andy parsons fires up the mindmap
Down to the nitty gritty and it was decided that we needed to go open source with a lot of AMSU stuff. There are some AMSU gems that we needed to keep from the old web presences, such as the resource library, jobs sections and agenda magazine. But we needed to expand the content around these – for example getting the resource library tagged up to allow easy searching, moving agenda magazine to more of a blog format and making the jobs section easily searchable.
The topic of digital literacy came up again, and we discussed how AMSU could have a role to play in helping Students’ Unions to understand how web 2.0 tools can be used to improve the organisation and how it operates.
We came away buzzing with loads of great ideas to really push AMSU forward and allow it to re-connect with a lot of its members. We’ll be working up our ideas ready for an online meeting (we’re going to try meeting via Skype) in February and then a further meeting in March to investigate the MSL system that now powers the content management system of the new AMSU site.
It was a great experience to bounce ideas around with John and Andy and I’m looking forward to working on the project over the coming months.
June 1st, 2009 at 1:20 pm
I loved the topics covered, found some of it hilarious myself (not in a bad way).
I think when it comes to the web, one of the things I find out is that there are many tools out there. But nothing beats learning core concepts the the basic fundamentals for yourself.
I’ve been told that I should just program my websites (I like both design/coding) and not to mix my skills but what happens when something goes wrong? Then you have to pay someone to do it for you.
Obviously I agree that you should learn the core language first before you use a tool to do it for you, because it gives you more control.
There are many ways to get a solution on the web. Nothing is really bad just by the nature of it, it too depends on how you proceed with a particular technology and that you understand what this is going to do and how it will effect the web environment.
Knowing when to utilize a technology and knowing the limits are a key aspect to not using the wrong tools for the job.
Interesting topic here, if it works then don’t fix it. But if it doesn’t work well enough, refine it.