Supporting Higher Education at WPCampus 2019
John Eckman on
Every year, 10uppers across the globe volunteer, speak at, and organize dozens of industry events. Whether its a local WordCamp or national jsConf, a niche conference like Write the Docs or an expansive one like CMS Expo, we make the time to give back to open-source and share our expertise.
Given our portfolio of client projects and partnerships in higher education, we’re thrilled to once again be a part of WPCampus, a three-day conference dedicated to the confluence of WordPress in higher education, taking place July 25-27, 2019 at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.
Sharing Our Knowledge
At the event, you’ll find us attending sessions and delivering the following presentations:
There’s a Reason We Call Them Institutions: The Five Dysfunctions of Higher Ed Web Teams
John Eckman
As a former professor, I have worked with many institutions of higher education and each was convinced they were a unique snowflake whose challenges could not possibly be understood by an outsider. While there are always exceptions, the reality is that there are remarkable similarities across many campus teams as they strategize, design, develop, and maintain their web presence. During this session, I will address examples of dysfunction, how to recognize it, and strategies to mitigate its impact in five core areas:
- Diffuse Authority
- Audience Ambiguity
- Site Proliferation and Content Accumulation
- Team Turnover: The Revolving Door and The Lifers
- Training Insufficiency
From Web to Print: WordPress as the Center of Your Higher Ed Print Publication Workflow
Ben Greeley
Many higher ed publications such as alumni magazines, annual reports, and course catalogues are created for both web and print. In this session, Ben Greeley, a Director of Engineering at 10up who previously spent nearly a decade in higher education, will address how WordPress can be extended to serve as the center of a print publication workflow. He will also highlight how Maine Today Media was able to completely change their four daily newspapers to be an efficient web-first workflow that empowers their print designers to easily import data directly from WordPress into InDesign for print newspaper layouts.
10up Understands Higher Education
10up not only serves campuses through direct consulting and agency services; we support the open-source community with code contributions, tools, sponsorships, and knowledge sharing—the resources they depend on.
One of those resources is our free, open-source, WordPress plugin Distributor. It empowers content managers to safely reuse and syndicate content across WordPress sites—a feature that we’ve found especially beneficial to universities. Many universities maintain multiple WordPress sites, often using network (multisite) mode to segregate departments and one off installations for microsites. Distributor can keep a single piece of content—like an event, course description, or professor’s biography—synchronized across multiple sites and departments.
We’re gratified to include several academic institutions in our portfolio, from an early HighEdWeb award-winning project collaboration with Bates College, to projects for renowned universities like the University of Maine, Boston University, Northeastern, Stanford, and UC Davis (to name a few).
See You in Portland
If you (or members of your team) will be in Portland in July, we’d love to meet up and talk with you about our free WordPress plugins, which can support academia with common challenges including content sharing—Distributor, accessibility—ClassifAI, and search—ElasticPress, or other ways 10up can help make a better web for Higher Ed.
Find us on Twitter: @10up, @jeckman, and @bengreeley.