Being an alumnus sitting in the UNIX sysadmin seat at IMSA and simultaneously a member of the IAA cabinet has illuminated what I believe is a serious problem: IMSA's approach to relating to its alumni is terribly fragmented.

From an IT perspective, consider the multiple different ways that alumni relate to IMSA:

- they can maintain their accounts on the IMSA computing systems, giving them continued access to an IMSA email address, web space, and notesfiles

- they can create a myIMSA account, giving them the ability to search for other alumni and update their address information to be able to receive the IMSAlum and news briefs

- they can browse and create accounts on IAA.org to get reunion information, pictures from intersession, and contribute to class notes (*chuckle*)

- there's information at http://www.imsa.edu/alumni, which is where you go if you follow the "alumni" link on IMSA's web page.

I think that this all should be under the IAA.

From IMSA's side, I feel like we set a very high bar to entry considering the services we provide. Alumni are subject to the state-mandated password changes, opening an account requires faxing paperwork and coordinating a phone call with me, etc. All that for email, a little bit of webspace, and notesfiles.

Finding alumni information is difficult. http://alumni.imsa.edu/ takes you to alumni homepages. http://www.imsa.edu/alumni gets you trailblazer stories and myIMSA. http://www.iaa.org/ has reunion information.

Given that IMSAfund is supposed to provide alumni relations for IMSA, and the IAA is the obvious vehicle for that within IMSAfund, I'd like to push for moving all of this under the IAA, and off of IMSA's (though perhaps not IMSAfund's) servers.

Thoughts?

I've pulled out of IAA business for the year for lack of time to commit, but, since Neal invited me to this thread and since I've got a fairly defined opinion on this thread, I figured I ought to chime in on the web content end of Neal's question.

I think that a move for greater consolidation might be due, but, when I look at each of the three existing websites' raisons d'être, it seems that perhaps the consolidation (at least with respect to web content) ought to be onto the Academy's servers, not the other way around.

Of the three sites with alum info that Neal enumerated (alumni.imsa.edu, www.imsa.edu/alumni, and iaa.org), only www.imsa.edu/alumni is completely indispensable. At present, I see little at alumni.imsa.edu or iaa.org that couldn't be migrated there. There were a lot of ambitious plans hatched for iaa.org when it stopped being hosted at IMSA. But two years later, what's been developed at iaa.org that couldn't be run as needed past Advancement, pasted into a template, and forwarded to CNS for posting?

Hosting with IMSA would also make for easy leverage of the traffic that www.imsa.edu/alumni draws via its existing static content (over a thousand discrete visits per months last I saw) and draws via the revamped myIMSA 3. Similarly, hosting with IMSA would make it easier to draw alum attention to programs and events at IMSA that they could get involved with.

Don't get me wrong -- I have a lot of respect for the effort that Neal and others have put into iaa.org. But, to be pragmatic, I just don't see what a separate iaa.org does for alums.

Now would be an excellent time to go back to IMSA hosting, too. I think that the Advancement office and CNS have proven themselves to be decent stewards of web content, and that coordinating with them to host IAA's largely static body of content would better serve IMSA's alums than the separately-hosted, separately-managed status quo.

And, to acknowledge an elephant in the corner: hosting with IMSA and coordinating with Advancement/CNS would almost have to result in an improvement in timeliness and availability. When it wasn't downed for days on end by uncorrected application server errors, iaa.org was still in January 2006 advertising the upcoming (June) 2005 Alumni Weekend.

Anyway, $0.02 given, perhaps only worth as much. But do consider it fairly -- getting out of the business of hosting on iaa.org might help IAA focus on greater things.

While I don't have much familiarity or knowledge of the current state of servers or politics of the situation, I can add that before becoming involved in the IAA, I was lost as an alumnus interested in "reconnecting." I wondered what had happened to my www.imsa.edu/~mozart page, and when I tried to reactivate my account, I couldn't submit a ticket to the CNS (maybe because my IP was off-campus - I don't remember exactly). I eventually gave up.

I would agree that the collection of the myIMSA portal, and the www.imsa.edu site, and the iaa.org site seem fragmented. I think it would help if we could present a consolidated list of resources available to alumni (these sites, plus perhaps information about IMSA accounts). I don't know if it makes more sense to move it all out to iaa.org, or shift it back to imsa.edu. When I was trying to reconnect, www.imsa.edu felt like "home" and I didn't know what iaa.org was all about. But, that's not something that couldn't be remedied by appropriate information on the imsa.edu site.

-Kathy

I've pushed this a bit with Advancement myself -- why the fragmentation and lack of official support for IAA.org. In general there seemed to be agreement that
1) www.imsa.edu/alumni is the public face of the institution
2) MyIMSA is the prime repository for alumni info
3) alumni still need some place to shoot the sh*t out of the public eye

One strong option would be to use the MyIMSA login as the means to provide access point to additional content -- be it this portal, IMSA-managed IAA-oriented content, discussion boards or whatever. That login falls outside of state-mandated stuff.

Key to selling this to Advancement would be to focus on how whatever Alumni content we're considering drives more people to MyIMSA to update their data and possibly give; without potentially exposing IMSA to negative public attention. From a governance perspective, the IAA is a branch of the IMSAFund so having iaa.org as "independant" is a bit of a fiction in my mind, however we've arranged the domain registrations.

I like Matt's idea that things might be more reliable (not to mention more physically secure and better-connected) if hosting were to take place at IMSA. I also agree with Paul that we should have a unified login for alumni to get to alumni services (MyIMSA or whatever); the constant confusion and complaints about IMSA passwords that land on my desk really highlight the fragmentation problem. I fear that the two, however, may be incompatible---my understanding is that we risk material findings by the state auditors if we have access to state systems that isn't protected by a similar degree of password and account security, which I think would be a serious deterrent to potential users.

One idea that I had was the possibility of IMSAFund/IAA maintaining separate servers at IMSA. I don't know if that would avoid the paperwork /account locking/password change issues that we face currently; I'd have to diouss this with Steve. At least this way, the server(s) would have a good physical location and connection to the Net.

As for selling this to Advancement, I think Kathy hit it on the head: being able to provide a consolidated list of alumni benefits would be a big draw for alumni to keep and maintain a MyIMSA/iaa.org/whatever account, which in turn helps IMSA keep in contact with them. Right now, the incentives seem weak compared to the benefits:

- you have to fax paperwork back and forth and manage to call IMSA during the work day -- and catch me at my desk -- to set up an IMSA account. For that, you get your IMSA email address and web space with 20MB of file and 20MB of email storage. Contrast this to something like GMail. (Yes, you get notesfiles, but I don't know if that matters to more than an handful of people after '01 or so).
- creating a MyIMSA account gives you the ability to find other alumni...if they've kept their information up to date. However, it seems that there's little way at present to get alumni to keep their information current, which limits its utility. If we were able to give out an email address with a myIMSA account, we could (mostly) guarantee that there'd be some line of communication available.
- creating an IAA.org account lets you...post to class notes? The main incentive to use the site, I think, is the ability to get reunion information. If you know to go there, that is.

Combining these benefits under one account with a lower barrier to entry seems to me like it would be more enticing.

Also, I'd like to second Paul's opinion about the "fiction" of the separation between the IAA and IMSAFund. It seems to me that the IAA is the natural vehicle for IMSAFund's alumni relations efforts; having the current separation of tasks seems to me to be counterproductive.