July 2009 Archives

I'm taking a bit of a divergence from my usual Penn State Web Conference topic to introduce myself in a new role as a member of Penn State's Staff Advisory Council. For all who are in ITS, or any Penn State staff member for that matter, please consider me a confidential conduit to presenting any pertinent issues to the council.

So, what is the Staff Advisory Council (SAC), you may ask?  Since I'm new to this, I'm still learning the answer to that question, but I'll give it my best shot.  It is a group of volunteers at Penn State who bring forth issues that affect staff members and advocate (through the Associate Vice President for Human Resources) for changes to policies, procedures or programming to the Central Administration.  For instance, the SAC has recently worked to get Automated External Defibrillators (AED) in the workplace as well as recommending the development of flexible work schedules and telecommuting policies.

For more information, the SAC web site may be found at http://www.ohr.psu.edu/sac/. 

Please do not hesitate to approach me with any issues you may wish to be brought in front of the council.  Any information shared will be kept strictly confidential.

Thanks!

P.

We recently received the evaluation report for the Penn State Web 2009 Conference. The results were both informative and confusing. Reviewing the conference evaluation report is always both a thrilling and humbling experience. The Penn State web developers certainly are not timid to speak their minds! When we miss the mark on something, we know it. The good news is that when we do something good, we also hear about it. Yep. Both thrilling and humbling for sure!

In reading the comments about the overall conference, we had an overwhelmingly positive response to what was offered on the agenda. However, on a couple of occasions in the long list of comments, we had a situation where one respondent would lament that the conference sessions were too advanced for them to keep up, followed by a response indicating that all of the sessions were too rudimentary. Somewhat confusing, but we don't take this feedback lightly. The planning committee works very hard to insure that a wide variety of topics and levels of difficulty are represented in each time slot. We will continue to work to tweak our offerings in the hope that eventually we will get it just right ;-)

We get a good number of suggestions and requests each year. This year, more than ever, we are seeing some strong trends that are intriguing. The planning committee has already discussed some exciting prospects for improving the conference based on these trends. The feasibility for these ideas is currently being determined. Once decisions are made and plans put into place, announcements will be made. All in good time...

This might be a good time to let you know that we are in the process of negotiating with an incredible potential keynote speaker as well. I think that 2010 could be a watershed year for the Web Conference. Just sayin'.

P.