The following criteria may be used to evaluate a Teams team, mailing list, or Community of Practice (COP) for inclusion in the IT Community portion of this site. Each of the criteria must be met for inclusion. Most criteria are qualitative with quantitative measures included where they can help inform a judgment. Quantitative measures should be used as guidelines rather than rigid rules.
Criteria for inclusion
Audience
IT professionals must be either the primary audience for a resource or a key audience among multiple audiences. A resource is not included if it is tangentially interesting to many IT pros – they must be an explicitly targeted audience.
Relevance
Few resources will be relevant to all IT pros, but they should at minimum be broadly relevant to a significant subset of IT pros dispersed across campus. The following criteria may help in determining whether a resource makes sense for inclusion. Resources do not need to meet all criteria; the more they meet, the better the signal for inclusion.
- Topic sufficiently broad to be relevant to IT pros with many disparate job duties
- Topic applicable to everyone within a particular recognizable sub-section of IT pros across many/all colleges (e.g. AV pros, help desk support, end user support, webmasters)
- IT pro audience sufficiently diffused across many different colleges (50 IT pros across dozens of colleges is preferable to 50 IT pros in a single college)
Topic timeframe
Resource must have a long-term timeframe with continuing relevance into the future; CoPs, Teams, or lists created for short-term needs (e.g. a single project or semester-long need) should not be included. The ideal timeframe is at least 2-3 years up to indefinite. Timeframes as short as 1 year may be considered on a case-by-case basis.
Ownership
Must be actively managed by two or (preferably) more current university employees. The owner(s) of the resource must be identifiable and responsive to inquiries about the resource.
Activity level
Must be active and maintained. For Teams and mailing lists, consider the cadence of postings; for CoPs, consider the cadence of meetings or communications among participants. A low volume of meetings/postings/communications is acceptable, as long as the resource does not appear abandoned. Resources with no activity in the past year and none scheduled for the coming year are unlikely to be included.
Minimum activity level by resource:
- MS Teams: monthly postings
- Mailing lists: monthly postings
- Communities of Practice: must hold meetings regularly (e.g. weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually)
Membership
Resource must have the following minimum membership/subscription base:
- MS Teams: 50 members
- Mailing lists: 50 subscribers
- Communities of Practice: 20 regular participants
If you would like to join, contact the Office of the CIO Communications and Marketing team.