Submitted by Mike Roy
Now that I’ve been here for a year, I wanted to start a conversation about the future of LISt. I really like the idea of LISt, and believe that it does serve an important internal communication need, allowing LIS to understand better what is happening elsewhere in the organization. That said, I think it could be even better with some relatively modest changes.
Here are some of my thoughts on what we might do to improve things:
1. Develop a schedule of topics to be written up, and invite suggestions about topics to be covered. As it stands, I sense that LISt is somewhat random in terms of the topics we cover. If we planned ahead a bit, we might do an even better job of keeping ourselves informed of what’s going on.
2. Change to an every other week schedule? Is every week too ambitious? Should we consider scaling back to an every other week schedule?
3. Expand the contributors. We certainly want to include the newly formed teams in LISt. Who else should we ask to post regularly?
4. Link accomplishments to the end of the year report. If we got in the habit of posting significant milestones via LISt, the activity of compiling the end of the year report would be much easier.
Those are some of my thoughts on tweaks we might make. I welcome comments, and other ideas for ways in which we can make LISt more effective. Other ideas for improving internal communications are, of course, always welcome!
— mike
I think #1 is great. With the right planning, it could be used to give an idea of where we want to go ahead of time, not just current snapshot or recent history of what we did.
I am all every other week. Maybe even less frequent in the summer.
Maybe we could get a regular feature (written by alternating people) giving the student worker take on LIS. (My Midd Student Worker Experience?)
#4 – Re-purposing content is always good.
I do take time to check out LISt and appreciate all the effort that goes into it. Most useful to me are the thumbnails of what others in LIS are doing and info about learning resources.
I think the every-other-week idea is a good one and I would always support planning ahead.
I am a regular reader of LISt, and I find it incredibly useful in my work in internal communications. I wonder how many readers you have (like me) who reside outside of LIS but use it to be better informed about their college. I think LISt could go to a fortnightly schedule without sacrificing timeliness and quality, but I would advise against monthly. Bryan’s idea about a “My Midd Student Worker” feature would generate some interesting stories that could, potentially, be used on the new homepage.