I enjoyed my day spent with Scottish Web Folk

These are my notes from attending the 2nd Scottish Web Folk gathering, and my compliments to the organisers at the University of Dundee and encouragement for them to go for a 3rd event.

Fellow traveller

It’s getting on for 10 years since I left higher education, in part frustrated that the uni I worked for wanted my team to pursue only a very narrow definition of digital that was based mostly on marketing and PR and where the thing that seemed to matter most was sending out eCards from the VC at Christmas.

Back then, my team and I were motivated more by service-outcomes for people in the university community and not just those in the upper offices. We were excited by the potential of digital technology to optimise what the university did and to transform what it was capable of.

While we often felt like a fringe group on our campus, we were encouraged by the response we got from our peers, which gave us encouragement that we were part of a larger (albeit nascent) community of practitioners energised by similar principles and objectives.

When I saw that the University of Dundee was running Scottish Web Folk 2024 billed as an opportunity to meet and learn about latest trends and challenges in digital at Scottish universities, I was keen to go along and find out how things had progressed in the sector.

Practitioners tales

It was a sunny day in Dundee and I was struck by the number of people attending and the buzz in the bright atrium of the Dalhousie Building. The 170 attendees were clearly up for the opportunity this second meeting of Scottish Web Folk.

The whole event was great but the morning featuring case examples direct from universities themselves was what I appreciated most.

Andrew Miller and Manifesto gave a great talk on how Dundee had determined the greenhouse gas emissions for the university’s website, inspired largely by the University of Stirling who had lain down a challenge to colleagues at the previous meeting to prioritise this aspect of their operations.

Through a process of mapping their site infrastructure (a tricky and valuable process in its own right) and then benchmarking and monitoring energy usage, the team had put the website’s emissions at approximately 1.8 tCO2e. Andrew spoke about how this might look a small figure next to the university’s overall GHG emissions, but thinking bigger picture having the numbers and the process to hand helped mature and enhance the conversations the central web team needed to have with departments and units about reducing sprawl and addressing under-ownership. Alongside, clarity of messaging, quality of user experience, and adherence to accessibility standards, reduction in emissions was another way in which in web teams can ‘lead a movement’ for continuous improvements in their universities.

University of Edinburgh delivered a complementary talk about efforts there to document and reduce emissions associated with their web estate. Stratos Filalithis underlined the scale of the task when he shared that his university had around 2000 sites and 1.3 million urls on the ed.ac.uk domain, administered by 1000+ web editors. That’s a lot, but likely to be a common problematic picture across universities and colleges.

The Digital Experience Team at the University of Glasgow gave an insight into how they had been tackling one part of their sprawl. They had learned about there being 17 separate health and wellbeing hubs across gla.ac.uk for Glasgow students, who far from feeling cared for probably felt confused in their time of need. Through a process of sprinting, prototyping, engaging with users, utilising a design system, and exercising their agency and expertise, the Glasgow team were ready in just 3 months to remedy the problem and provide clear and consolidated guidance given due prominence on the student landing page.

Pressing the message that these ways of working are effective and within the means of all universities was Neil Allison, who gave his story about how he has learned to run purposeful usability testing and analysis at scale. Starting at Sheffield and now running the process routinely at Edinburgh, Neil gave practical tips on how to capture real data from real users doing real tasks, and to engage teams and stakeholders in review of that testimony to create focus and directional alignment on what to do as a result. Neil acknowledged that decision-making in universities was a hard problem but also solvable with some cost-effective, insight-rich methods applied consistently and assertively.

St Andrews also brought a perennial problem of updating course information, and presented their solution of ‘a content management system within a content management system’. It was a fascinating insight into how the university wrangled with the capabilities of its mainstream software to handle routine tasks and how they had turned to micro services and in-house developer capabilities to meet their needs. Challenges upon challenges.

Leading on from optimisation to transformation

I was impressed. Impressed by all the multidisciplinary efforts going on in the universities to be genuinely user-focused and do a lot with a little in terms of resources, but also by their authentic willingness to share and encourage one another in what is an increasingly competitive sector.

What also struck me was for all the abundant focus on optimisation of web operations, there was a scarcity of transformation. So while I was encouraged by the spread and scale of the values and creative digital delivery methods, I came away wanting more and greater urgency around how digital technology and ways of working could provide leadership in universities that needed to address the vulnerabilities in institutional models and the raised expectations amongst the sector’s users.

The complexity of what needs done is its professional appeal. For me, some of the answers to the challenges lie in a movement for common standards, shared publishing and data infrastructure, and improved capability amongst university leadership to provide direction and governance when it comes to services for university communities.

Based on the experience of attending Scottish Web Folk, I think it provides an ideal forum for the exploration that needs to take place amongst expert practitioners about what’s working and pushing for more of what needs to be done.

So roll on Scottish Web Folk 3.