Warigia Bowman, Doctoral Student in Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

I'm Warigia Bowman and I'm a doctoral student in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government.

One thing that I think is a policy decision is what do you want your website to be. Is it advertising for your organization? Is your website a way for people within the organization to get their work done more efficiently? Or is the website a repository of information? Or is it a combination of those things? And I think that your decision about what purpose you want your digital identity to serve, or what combination of purposes you want it to serve, will affect how you present yourself to the world.

It seems to me that there need to be a lot more links between the web presences of the different schools. I like to connect to people, and I've tried to connect to professors who work in a similar area but didn't know each other well, and that was linked into connecting them technologically. And by that I mean there was a website for the National Center for Digital Government, and I went to the aid who runs it, who's the webmaster for the Center, and I said, oh, there's this professor who I would like the other professor to meet and I'd first of all like to introduce them but I'd also like them connected through the web presence of the Center for Digital Government, and maybe that could facilitate a meeting. But at a minimum what it did was it made it clear that they were working on the same material in the same building.

I think if you look at the Harvard web presence as well as the Kennedy School web presence, one thing that you'll notice is that they're pretty disconnected, and this is a reflection of the fact that a lot of the research that's going on at the school is somewhat disconnected even though people are really researching the same area. And I think creating the technological links goes hand-in-hand and should occur simultaneously with creating human links.

I think conferences are a really good way to get people together. People who are experts in social capital say that conferences, directories, small meetings…so those are projects… Maybe even getting the webmasters together: it might make sense to have the webmasters of the Kennedy school and all the other schools getting together in monthly meetings to see what they're working on.

Very simple things that create community are the most effective use of technology. I really couldn't visualize 10 years ago how I would be using technology now. So how do we use our resources in the future to create community, even though we can't necessarily visualize what they'll look like technologically? It's more, how are we going to use them? It's more of our mindset about: are we using this as advertising to facilitate in-group relationships or to work with people outside? I think that how are we using the technology may be more important than what exactly does the technology do.

One resource that's actually gotten worse since I've been here is HOLLIS, which is the electronic resources for the library. I really like HOLLIS and I used it a lot last year, but somehow the way they've done the interface, it's now very difficult to understand what you're supposed to do to get a hold of… especially electronic journals, which are really important. A lot of academic journals are online in electronic form. I guess there's a tension between upgrading the visuals of our web presence and making sure that it's actually usable.

I think overall the administration is fairly responsive to student concerns. I don't know how you would institutionalize student participation in the web presence other than hiring more students on a part-time basis to work on the digital identity of Harvard. The problem with students as workers-and I know this as student who's a worker-is that their time is very erratic, and so for me to work steadily on a project like maintaining a website is very difficult. Or even running the list that I run is difficult because I have uneven patches of time. Somebody has made the analogy of being an artist, but I think a normal employee has a lot more solid time to dedicate to maintaining a website or working on developing a database.