Sebastian Rahtz, Oxford University Computing Services, Patrick H. Lauke, University of Salford and Nigel Bradley, Web Services Manager, IT Services, Northumbria University will encourage delegates to put together a set of small demonstrations of applications in different institutions (at least Salford, Bath, Oxford and Northumbria), discuss different techniques of acquiring and storing data, see whether there are any useful inter-institutional collaborations to work on.

Stuart Smith, MIMAS considers that we live in a time in which a plethora of portable computing devices are available such as mobile phones, handheld computers, gaming devices and movie and music players. These devices offer powerful computing power, often on a par with desktop computers of only a few years ago. Additionally, they are increasingly have wireless connectivity to the Internet. These devices are in wide spread usage and are considered affordable by many students and academics. The array of portable computing power can be bewildering this session will look at options available and how they might used by institutions to increase the learning value for students.

Ross Gardler, OSS Watch, University of Oxford and Andrew Savory, Managing Director, Sourcesense UK will consider what makes a service usable and sustainable? Is it one that offers you a service level agreement (SLA)? Or is it one that has sufficient clients that it is likely to survive long-term? And can a service that is principally a "social" service be sustainable? And how might communities of practice relate to the sustainability of an open service?

Debbie Nicholson, Web Support Officer, Web Support Unit, University of Essex will investigate the ways in which web-based resources can be used to develop and support WP initiatives and how these could be transferred to other areas within the Institution.

Andrew Cormack, Richard Dunning and Andy Powell, Eduserv will investigate the relationships between institutional single sign-on, Athens, Shibboleth, the UK Access Management Federation and more recent developments like OpenID and CardSpace and will give participants an opportunity to ask questions of a panel of experts from the community.

Diane McDonald is a senior member of the PREDICT Research Group, part of the Information Strategy Directorate of the University of Strathclyde. Her current major interests are in the e-business area. She has responsibility for the development of a Managed Learning Environment, general WWW strategy and ITC security policy & strategy within the University. She is also responsible for the development of the demonstration and dissemination facilities for the West of Scotland based e-institute, of which the University is the senior partner. She was previously the Network Manager for the University.

Ed Bristow is the Technical Manager of the PKI Project within the Information Technology Services Group of the Australian Taxation Office. Ed has worked for the ATO for most of the last 12 years, moving from database to mainframe applications to his current role in electronic service delivery. Ed has spent periods working in the private sector and prior to finding his way into IT was a librarian with the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library in Canberra.

Andrew Savory is managing director of Luminas Limited, an Internet application company, and was a university Webmaster for a number of years.

A sponsors page containing details of the sponsorship packages available has now been set up. Interested parties should contact the organisers. [2006-08-24]

Information on members of the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 Advisory Group is now available [2006-10-23]

The call for speakers and workshop facilitators is now open. Messages were sent to the website-info-mgt and web-support JISCMail lists. [2007-01-08]

The call is now closed, but if you do have an idea that you would really like included in the workshop please contact Marieke Guy, chair of the workshop as soon as possible. [2007-02-26]

Information on the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 social events, the workshop dinner and a drinks reception at the National Railway Museum, are now available. [2007-03-26]

A fly-poster for Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007 has been put up on the wall at the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007 and blogged about in Andy Powell's SecondLife blog. [2007-05-14]

Bookings are now closed for the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2007. If you would like to put your details on a mailing list please contact events@ukoln.ac.uk or a member of the organising committee [2007-06-01]

Alison Wildish has written a guest blog post for Brian Kelly's "UK Web Focus: Reflections On The Web" blog [2007-06-01]

Paul Boag has written a guest blog post for "Brian Kelly's UK Web Focus: Reflections On The Web" blog [2007-06-04]

An IWMW2007 group has been created on Facebook. Join up now! [2007-06-11]

Delegate information on venue, registration, travel, accommodation and other aspects of the workshop is now available. [2007-06-22]

Please note that registered delegates will receive a delegate bag when they register, provided courtesey of Interwoven, one of the event sponsors. [2007-06-22]

A photograph of the bag which will be provided to IWMW 2007 delegates is now available. [2007-07-12]

Dave Lomas, University of Salford, gave a talk entitled "WebTools".

Brenda Lowndes, University of Liverpool, gave a talk entitled "WWW / Database Integration".

David Murie, University of Dundee, gave a talk entitled "Charisma or camel? A sociotechnical approach to Web redesign".

Nick is an Information Systems developer based in the Faculty of Economic and Social Studies in the University of Manchester. His role is to develop (mostly Web) applications to support teaching and administration. Nick gave a talk entitled "'He left the course 3 months ago?' - Web front-ends to student databases".

Andrew Aird studied music at Birmingham University and King's College, London. Working at Loughborough University in the early 1980s gave him access to personal computer technology, resulting in a career in music technology. Andrew specialised in applications for composing and publishing, and this aspect led him to become interested in the possibilities offered by the World Wide Web. His current role as Web Site Manager at Goldsmiths College is part-time; he also develops web solutions for music publishers, composers and performers. Swimming, skiing, concerts and visual art fill the scarce hours not spent thinking about, or working on, the web. Andrew gave a talk entitled "Does Web Content Grow On Trees?".

With the introduction of variable fees Universities have entered what education secretary Ruth Kelly called "a new era". Financial departments have had to find more creative ways to meet the sector's growing competitive demands and those working within universities have had to take a more business-like, customer-focused approach to many aspects of their work as they compete for students.

Paul Boag, from Headscape, considers how social participation is the cornerstone of the web 2.0 movement and has been spearheaded by sites such as digg.com. One of the underlying principles of these sites is that peer to peer recommendations carry more weight than those from either a search engine or from corporate advertising. The commercial sector has been quick to adopt this peer review mechanism with customer reviews and ratings. This talk proposes to explore how social participation can be applied to the process of recruiting new students and what lessons can be learnt from the approach adopted by the commercial sector. We will also look at what institutional barriers exist that prevent this approach and how these can be overcome.

Peter Reader, University of Bath explains that E-communications, e-marketing and social media are hot topics for university marketers and communicators, with old ideas of 'control' looking more and more unrealistic. Now the talk is of 'influence', viral marketing, students as customers, and of client management, with the web and web technologies seen increasingly as the university's most important marketing tools. So what are the challenges, and what are the issues with which marketers will face us? Expect more of "why" and "want" than of "how"!

Arthur Clune, Honeynet Project, discusses how attacks on Web servers, and internet connected devices in general have become both more common and more sophisticated in recent years. This talk will look at how people attack Web servers, and what they are hoping to gain from it, based on data from the Honeynet Project's deployment of Honeypot servers worldwide.

Jeff Barr, Amazon Web Services (Senior Manager, Web Services Evangelism) will discuss Amazon's approach to Web-scale computing. Using this new approach, developers can use Amazon's broad line of web services to rapidly and cost-effectively build scalable and flexible Web applications. Jeff will focus on Amazon's newest services, including the Simple Queue Service, the Simple Storage Service, and the Elastic Compute Cloud. The talk will include technical details and an overview of how the services are being used by customers all over the world.

Alison Wildish, Head of Web Services, Edge Hill University will talk about how Students are asking each other for help and advice rather than coming direct to our staff. These same students are advising our applicant community about University life and they're all doing it in an "informal" environment. These are all positive developments but it does mean we start to ask the question... if we're moving towards developing and nurturing students in these online communities and empowering them to help themselves, will we still need a "corporate" Web site in the future? Furthermore with the increase in "free" tools available such as email, file storage, blogs etc. - will Institutional systems be a thing of the past?

Steven Warburton will discuss how the notion of community continues to be recognised as a fundamental aspect within descriptions of shared human activity and group bonding. In his socio-cultural analysis of the work place Wenger defined a particular type of communion, which he termed a community of practice (CoP). The concept of a CoP has been somewhat abused in current literature yet it does provide valuable insights into how communities evolve, behave and sustain themselves. By elaborating dimensions of community such as shared practice, dialogue, legitimate peripheral participation and negotiation of boundaries, Wenger has provided a model that can be applied to a number of differing groups of activity. This talk will explore what we can draw from the work on CoPs, in terms of the role and identity of institutional web manager, one that is inseparable from a field of practice that remains dynamic, fluid and under constant negotiation.

Chris Young, Netskills, University of Newcastle and Paul Trueman, Netskills, University of Newcastle will be looking at accreditation systems. You may be new to a Web-role or you may be more experienced, with a set of useful skills. Either way, increasingly there is a need for recognised individual development and accreditation in order to progress in within your organisation and with your own career.

Emma Tonkin, UKOLN and Adam Hardy will consider that User testing is often considered to be prohibitively expensive, complicated and time-consuming; the good news is that at least two of these assumptions are wrong. This hands-on session demonstrates how to use scenario-based user testing to check out the usability of a small application. It concentrates on accessible and practical real-world techniques for user testing, analysing the results, and working out how to apply them - as quick fixes, long-term aims or feature requests.

This session will be run by Michael Day, DCC, UKOLN, Maureen Pennock, DCC, UKOLN and Lizzie Richmond, University Archivist, University of Bath. Institutional Web sites have become an increasingly important tool for disseminating key institutional information to and between staff, students, researchers and the general public. They are widely recognised as key front-office mechanisms for the communication of important information, but the long-term survival of Web site resources and data with non-transient or enduring value is often overridden by the short-term benefits of on-the-fly Web site management. As a result, even institutions with Web site archiving policies can find themselves falling victim to the so-called digital dark ages and fail to preserve valuable information.

Duncan Davidson, Information Manager, University of Abertay Dundee and Donna Wilkinson, Information Specialist, University of Abertay Dundeed will look at their University's development plans, the related projects - University Portal and Information Architecture, where we have been, current work and the road ahead.

In December 2005 the Web Development team at the University of Bath set up a departmental wiki where they could keep track of information. In this workshop Philip Wilson, University of Bath will explain the reasons for using a wiki, not just for education but for codifying knowledge and working practices in departments and how they can best be utilised so that it is used by everyone in the department, and how to stop it becoming an unmaintained silo of archaic data.

Andy Ramsden, Learning Technology Advisor, Learning Technology Support Service, University of Bristol and Paul Ayres, SOSIG Research Officer, ILRT will be looking at podcasts. The aim of this workshop is that by the end the participant will be able to answer the following five questions; 1) What is podcasting? 2) How do you create, distribute and subscribe to a podcast? 3) What is good practice in terms of designing and creating podcasts? 4) How might podcasts be effectively used in an educational context? 5) Where should people go for more information?

Debbie Nicholson, Web Support Officer, University of Essex will show how putting quality measures in place can prevent getting a brief for a Web design job that reads "not blue, a bit random, and not too Scottish". Don't laugh, this actually happened! This hands on session will get participants thinking about how they can introduce quality assurance procedures within the web design process. It will cover establishing a 'quality loop', creating measurable standards and will introduce ways to enable clients to be better informed about what they want from their new Web site.

Brian Kelly, UKOLN and Lawrie Phipps, JISC will review the barriers which we may face when implementing a Web 2.0 strategy and will outline a model and strategies which can be be used in order to address such barriers.

David Burden, Managing Director, DADENLIMITED and Marieke Guy, UKOLN will consider questions like: Can chatbots make sites more accessible or do they break fundamental usability rules? Do users like them, or find them irritating or even patronising? Are they the next best thing or a 5 minute wonder? Can they really benefit the education sector? Can a chatbot ever really learn?

Rob Bristow, Information Services Manager, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol and Mark Lydon, i2a Consulting will look at Access Grid Node (AGN), an exciting area of development in communication within the academic, research and commercial worlds. Using open standards to transmit video and audio using IP Multicast networking, it is a type of video collaboration that allows a rich and immediate means of communicating with remote sites, while also being able to share presentations, data, complex visualizations and video. AGN is a technology that scales; from a single user node running with a Webcam on a laptop, up to a lecture theatre with multiple cameras and projectors. It also scales from one-to-one conversations to multi-site meetings, seminars and conferences.

Julie Allinson and Mahendra Mahey, UKOLN will give an overview of the current repository landscape, looking at the different types of repositories, their use within education and the range of issues relating to repositories, including cultural, social, legal, technical and policy considerations. Current JISC work in this area will be highlighted, focussing on how this work will contribute to raising quality standards in repository development, through interoperability and the use of open standards.

Alison Wildish is an advocate of institutions embracing third party services to support their marketing/communications initiatives and has an active interest in the opportunities offered by personalisation and user owned technologies. Heading up the Web Services team at the University of Bath she manages the central Web team and is responsible for the strategic direction of University Web services. She formerly held the same position at Edge Hill University where she led projects which include the University portal project and the development of the Applicant Community Web site (winner of a UCISA best practice award). Alison blogs at "http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/webservices". Alison gave a plenary talk on "Look Who's Talking Now ...".

Derrick McClure is a Senior Lecturer in the English School of Language & Literature at the University of Aberdeen. Derrick gave the opening address.

David Hyett is Head of Information & Records Management at the British Antarctic Survey. When he's not pushing back the frontiers of science and exploring new lands in the Antarctic, he manages information projects both across BAS and its parent organisation NERC. He has direct responsibility in BAS for Web, archives, data management and library services. David gave a plenary talk on "Web 2.0 - Whatever Happened to Web 1.0?".

In previous IWMWs sessions have focussed on issues such as: Should we buy or build our CMS? Which CMS should we implement? How do we implement our CMS? How can we measure the impact of our CMS Implementation? And how do we address The CMS Challenge? But last year it was claimed that "There is no such thing as a silver bullet" and that a CMS will not solve all your problems. Has the CMS bubble bust? Has content management become content mis-management? In the light of new approaches, such as Web 2.0, and new 'ways of doing things' is there a feeling of disillusionment with 'ye old CMS'? Or does a CMS remain the backbone of a good institutional Web site? In this debate you will hear the arguments for and against content management systems and will have an opportunity to express your views.

The Web is changing. It is no longer a phenomenon but has integrated itself within our culture. However for those creating Web services times are far from stable. A wide range of Web-based applications continue to be developed, such as blogs, wikis, podcasting, social networking software, RSS feeds etc. The Semantic Web is still on the cards and now we have Web 2.0, an opportunity for a more sharing, more participative Web? Is it just hype? Will these progressions make any difference to the way in which we go about our work? What does Web 2.0 mean to the Institutional Web? This panel session offered three different perspectives on the potential of Web 2.0 within learning activities - the library perspective, the commercial perspective and the HE/FE perspective.

Randy Metcalfe, OSS Watch and Brian Kelly, UKOLN gave a plenary on openess and the Web manager. Openness appears to be all the rage: open standards for interoperability, open source for software development and deployment, and open content for sharing knowledge. What brings these phenomena together is a commitment to openness. But how do colleges and universities engage with openness? And more particularly, what does it mean for institutional Web managers.