User:Robbie/TechComm Key Activities

Robbie McClintock

Reactions to the Key activities section of the draft Windrows long term tech plan

Key activities: [What can and should we do?]

1. Monitoring the functioning and content of the resident website, recommending improvements and offering seminars to residents on how to access and use the website. [I've monitored it since before coming to Windrows 3 years ago. The public facing parts maintained by the real estate office were helpful. The functioning of resident oriented parts are stiff, off-putting, and unresponsive. The content is boring, too likely to be inaccurate and out-of-date, and it neither occasions, requires, or rewards activity by residents. Until residents have reasons to access the website, seminars on how to access and use the website will have little effect.]
2. Responding to requests for technical assistance from other resident committees by either providing direct assistance, or by directing residents to others able to help. [Responding to requests aren't enough. The tech committee should work with the chairs and select members of other committees to design, implement, and encourage use of online resources that will facilitate work by the members of other committees. To have an active community of technology users, the tech committee needs to nurture it (beginning with ourselves). ]
3. Develop and implement programs to help boost residents’ comfort with using technology and bolster their technological literacy. [As of mid-May, the online directory of residents lists 327 persons. Many of them are uncomfortable using technology and choose not to do so. Development and implementation resources are scarce and I don't think we should expend them in remedial efforts directed at those who don't much care to use them. We should devote our development and implementation efforts to the large middle ground of residents who are comfortable and literate but find the technological opportunities at Windrows uninspiring and not very useful.]
4. Monitoring the functioning of technology used throughout Windrows to ensure that it is operating correctly and working with staff to correct problems. [Is the poor operation of what we currently have the limiting factor with communication and technology at Windrows? It pretty well works well enough for what it is. We need to extend the current functioning and make it all more interesting. What might we do within the scale of resources we can muster?]
5. Researching and recommending technologies that could:
   1. Improve the efficiency or lower the cost of regularly-occurring procedures at Windrows, with a particular focus on communications. [Is this consistent with the often-voiced concern to make Windrows technologically attractive to younger potential residents? Are there important possibilities that don't regularly occur at present?]]
   2. Facilitate residents’ participation in Windrows life while they are both on campus and away. [Yes, but @c below.]
   3. Facilitate online communication between residents. [Yes, but to what degree do we need to pay more attention to the interaction between residents online and external online communities and resources?]
   4. Improve energy efficiency. [Of course, but is it our proper focus? Buildings and grounds?]
6. Working with the Board and Staff to develop long-term technology goals and implementation plans; developing data necessary for evaluating progress toward achieving these goals. [Should we include concerns about Purpose and Human Agency in framing our activities and in evaluating their effectiveness? Do organizational goals and plans generate sufficient aspirational effort?]
7. Implementing a Bi-annual technology satisfaction and need survey among residents and staff. [Will satisfaction and felt need drive excellence?]

I want to close by asking about the actual activities we should expect to engage in as members of the Technology Committee. In my experience, still brief at Windrows, participation in Advisory Committees is pretty laid back. The Chair[s] do the bulk of the work and participants show up once a month for a one-hour meeting, primarily to comment lightly on the Chair's work or to participate in a walk-around to understand better the service they nominally oversee. Somewhere I picked up the notion that Service committees were different, that all the members participated in producing some deliverables, i.e., members of the Gray Gardens Service Committee garden and manage the gardening of others who sign up for a plot. I think we need to build up a hands-on feel for what an excellent communications and technology environment for Windrows would be like.