DCMOC

A Creed

July 13, 2007 | Filed under: General

I’ve been working on defining some of the core practices and beliefs of the CM&OC team. These are all part of a larger CM&OC manifesto, excerpts of which I’ll be posting here regularly. I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on these items.

 Anyway, here are some elements of the CM&OC creed:

• We believe humans excel at creative, collaborative, thoughtful work. Humans struggle with tasks they are ill-suited for – like repetitive, rote maintenance.  Fortunately, we have designed machines (like computer hardware and software) to do these rote tasks much more quickly and accurately than we can.  CM&OC believes in using them. In short, we understand that web pages should be designed by people, and written by people, but assembled by computers.  Bluntly: we want to free the monkeys and harness the machines.

• We make smart decisions.

• We are advocates for those who use our sites. When making decisions about navigation, information architecture, organization, prioritization, we’ll generally favor options that enhance the user experience. We believe Web sites should be organized according to the needs of the users, not according to the org charts of the host organization.

• We understand that Web content changes over time, in a way other media content does not. Unlike a book, a brochure, a clay pot, or a piece of film, users expect web content to be easily and regularly revised.  (Side note: this is why “under construction” pages, so popular in the 90s, with their cute icons of little construction workers, were basically pointless.  Almost all web sites are, in some way, “under construction.”) Therefore, a truly well designed web experience includes – by definition — a  maintenance / content management plan. Otherwise, it is just posing as a well-designed web experience for the sake of oohs and ahhs at launch. Time will reveal it to be a fraud.

Some might say that our insistence on a maintenance plan conflicts with our advocacy for the user experience.  If a user experienced is improved by something, and we “favor options that enhance the user experience” why should we balk simply because of maintenance?  However, we believe these two tenets are not in conflict. We believe that efficient maintenance actually translates to improved user experience, for many reasons, not the least of which is because it reduces staleness and inaccuracy of content.

• We aren’t afraid to ask questions.

• We are transparent. We believe in sharing what we are doing.

• We take a systemic view of our world and our work.

• We believe in unity. That is, what we publish can vary widely in tone, in scope, in audience, but everything should be aware of its place and its role in our family of web publications. 

• We support the broader organization.  While we may ask tough questions to make sure the directives we are given truly fulfill the need of the organization, we are here to make others’ lives and jobs easier.

• We produce results.  The work we do directly results in happier, more productive staff, faculty, learners – and we can explain exactly how.

• While we are experts, we aren’t territorial. We apply our expertise in order to support others’ expertise. More: we believe expertise should dictate territory, rather than the other way around.  If our constituents are territorial, we demonstrate how our expertise can augment their expertise to accomplish a project, improve an experience, etc.

• We like elegance; we dislike bloat.

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