To those of you who attended, thank you for participating in the IRC meeting on web issues last week.

I would especially like to thank the Web Development Group (WDG), Michael Elliott, and others from his office and Medical Network Services for their presentations on different web issues.

While the presentations and discussions covered a number of topics, I would like to summarize some of the key points made:

  • A consistent and professional look and feel for the medical school web site is a very desirable and important goal.
  • Security of web pages and data is very important, and a critical requirement for clinical or patient related pages.
  • The Web Development Group is spearheading the development of web pages, tools and servers for the Medical School. Most of this effort has so far focused on the clinical and medical departments. They have developed a detailed "live" faculty database, and several web page templates. This group of talented developers is being moved under the administrativecontrol of Dr. Gardner office starting July 1st.
  • While the WDG maintains centralized & secure web servers, there are many other web servers and developers on the medical campus. Many at the meeting felt that calling these servers as "rogue" servers was offensive, and Richard Bookman suggested that the term "independent" servers be used.
  • There are a wide range of opinions about the need or desirability of centralizing web page creation, maintenance and hosting. These needs differ widely for web content related to clinical, research and teaching activities, and it is undesirable to impose the strict restrictions necessary for clinical pages on everyone else.
  • Provisions also need to be made to encourage diversity and innovation in web content, to allow for academic freedom, and to account for specialized research web pages (databases, hardware/software control, etc.)
  • A draft web policy for the medical school (mostly extensions to the overall UM web policies) was circulated at the meeting. Dr. Bookman also circulated a rough draft of web policies for the Basic Sciences departments. These drafts do not fully address hosting and control issues, and there has been little or no participation of the faculty and "independent" web sites on the medical school campus on these issues.
  • There has been only limited discussion on many of these issues between the WDG and the faculty and/or the "independent" web servers on campus.
  • There appears to be a lack of well publicized formats and guidelines that the "independent" web servers need to follow to become "compliant".

    • Policy issues related to the web are clearly of great interest and importance to the faculty, and these should ultimately be approved by the Medical School Faculty Council.

    In our role as a standing committee on IT issues for the school council, I propose that the IRC come up with a set of general recommendations that can then be taken up by a more specialized committee of faculty and web professionals, and presented to the School Council for approval and implementation.

    For the next IRC meeting (in late July/early August), I would like to invite any interested "independent" web servers on campus to present their opinions on how web services on campus should be regulated and managed. This will be followed by an IRC meeting in late August/early September to finalize a set of recommendations to be forwarded to the School Council. Dates and agendas for these meetings will be emailed out as soon as they are finalized.