Academic Staff Communications Committee

Meeting, 8/26/09

Minutes

Present: Brian Rust, Bob Ash, Bob Rettammel, Dick Geier, Renee Meiller

Guest: Donna Silver

•Welcome to Donna Silver, new secretary of the academic staff. Donna gave an overview of her office and mentioned that Julie Bailey will be retiring and she has been given clearance to hire a full-time classified staff member to fill Julie's position. In addition, Donna mentioned that her physical office has undergone a makeover, making it brighter and more inviting.

•Summary of the ASEC planning retreat. ASEC invited all standing committee chairs to participate in this facilitated meeting that set five prioritiy areas to focus on in the coming year. They include communication and discussion about furloughs; collective bargaining, and an ad hoc committee to address issues; process updates and redesign; updated academic staff policies and procedures; and establishing strategic partnerships/dialog with key audiences/people.

•Thinking big about the website: What's possible for the second iteration? We brainstormed a number of ideas and prioritized four for further exploration. Those include streamlining the homepage/homepage content, working with ASEC chair on monthly video updates, exploring an RSS feed and its cost for implementation, and exploring a moderated bulletin/message board and its cost for implementation. Other ideas included moving the video to the navigation area, adjusting the relative sizing of homepage content based on its importance, adding a place to recognize outgoing chairs (news, perhaps), reordering/renaming the navigation links to be more user-centered, implementing a blog, adding the UW System PowerPoint about what collective bargaining means to academic staff, moving documents that previously had been printed to web and driving traffic to website via short letters or semi-regular E-mails, establishing partnerships with other committees to ensure content is updated regularly

We will meet on Sept. 4 at 9 a.m. in 302 Teacher Ed.