Behind the scenes, AASHE is working on a major upgrade to its data management and website. Our goal is to build on the content-focused services that AASHE is known for. AASHE prides itself on aggregating and organizing information about the campus sustainability movement into useful collections that are high quality, searchable and timely. As the campus sustainability movement accelerates, we realize we need to accelerate the speed with which we collect, organize and deliver information to our members. In order to do that, we will be employing some new technology, but the focus will always be on providing useful content.

Below are some of the features we are working to roll out within the next 9 months. As we are in the process of developing these features, now would be a *great* time to give us feedback on what you would like to see. (No promises we can meet every wish.) Please leave your suggestions as comments at the bottom of this post.

Blogs: We just launched one blog and will host more in the future. The goal of the blogs will be to provide some commentary on happenings in the campus sustainability movement. With its Bulletin, Digest and Resource Center, AASHE has done a great job of cataloging the happenings in the campus sustainability movement. Blogs will allow AASHE staff and other guest bloggers to share opinions and perspectives on campus sustainability.

Member Services: We intend to improve a number of the services our site provides to members. Creating accounts and accessing the Resource Center can be a little tricky at times (unmemorable passwords that cannot be changed, for example). Customizable passwords are on their way. But more importantly, soon website visitors coming from member campus IP addresses will be logged in automatically.

Wikis: One question we struggle with is “when do we have enough content collected to add a new section to the Resource Center?” We don’t want to put things out that are incomplete or low-quality. But, incomplete resources are often better than no resources. We think Wikis will help with this. We can get new resources started and then let our user community add and grow the resource over time.

Photo Repository: AASHE constantly gets requests for high resolution photos from media outlets and campuses. As we travel around to campuses and conferences, we will be taking photos to put into a photo repository that can be used by media and campuses alike. We hope you will submit photos to the repository as well.

Community Dialogue: Mailing lists are great, but they have their limitations. Forums are nice, but they also have their limitations. We are currently researching discussion-hosting software that will allow our users to get the best of both worlds.

Multi-media Content: Currently, most of AASHE’s resources are text-based. Text is great for searching and skim-reading, but it isn’t always the best medium for every resource. For example, when somebody gives a great speech, the only way to capture it in text is through a transcript. That doesn’t quite do justice to the speaker/event/experience. We have already started capturing speeches, webinars and interviews in audio/video formats. You will start to see the arrival of that kind of content in the coming months.

Geographic Data: With Google Earth and Google Maps, it is now becoming possible to create rich data layers to share in those two programs. We are currently working on creating a map interface for our membership so that it will be easier for site visitors to identify and contact member schools in their region. Beyond that, I think it would be great if every campus created a sustainable projects map (check out University of Tennessee’s map). Then, AASHE could tie them all together into a Virtual Campus Sustainability Tour, similar to the virtual mountain-top removal mining tour. Anybody want to help me with that?

Syndication: “Really Simple Syndication” (RSS) allows for us to notify you when things change on our site. Would you like to know when a new post is made on this blog? Subscribe to the blog! Would you like to know when a new resource is posted in the Resource Center? Subscribe… Oh, that’s the future of syndication at AASHE! More sections of our site will be set up with RSS feeds so you won’t have to check the site regularly in order to catch changes.

As I said at the beginning, we’d love to hear your ideas. Please post them in the comments section below so everyone can see.

And, if anyone is interested in volunteering some programming time to work on any of these cool projects, that will of course help speed things up.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Information Technology, Sam Hummel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.