A recent observation has led me to consider how I think I would put together a law school website. I've discussed some related ideas in the past. At that point, my obvious consumer was the law student. There is, of course, a broader audience for the site as a whole. In addition to students, there are prospective students, professors, prospective professors, staff, and the outside world.

This time around, perhaps I will examine this issue from the perspective of key principles.

Embrace Commentary

Like most businesses, law schools tend to administer commentary very carefully when they can. This overlooks the reality that both good and bad comes from open dialog. Open up commentary and allow the community to share information about what's going on. If it's particularly sensitive, you can always limit it to within the community. However, beyond what's protected by privacy laws, there's little harm in allowing people to talk. In fact, that hardest part is getting people to talk.

How do we get people talking?

• The law school should take on the role of getting people talking. Whether they do so via discussion-oriented mailings lists, web discussion boards, blogs, or, preferably, an appropriate combination, the school has all of the contact information, and the school has the means to get the conversation started.
• Blogs. Yes, it's part of the first point, but it remains important. Get the registrar's office to blog about why it's taking time to post the next semester's schedule. Have the CSO blog about job postings, upcoming events, or just what's happening around the office. Get professors blogging, letting the community know about their research, their publications, their classes, etc. Get the students blogging. Yes, folks will see this as a risky venture, but let the students say what they're going to say. Are they not saying it if they're speaking only amongst themselves? Hardly.
• Polls and ratings. Get people to provide feedback about classes, professors, the sandwiches in the cafeteria, etc.

People who converse with one another form communities. Communities tend to be loyal. Schools need all the loyalty they can get.

Embrace Sharing

Why is it that the bulk of the search requests that bring people to my site relate to the USF School of Law information I've posted? Because I've posted it online, and the school hasn't. A school should make information like the student handbook, grade distributions, status of grade postings from professors, etc., all available online.

Students should be encouraged to share. Yes, law school is competitive; more precisely, the job market leaving law school is competitive. So what? That doesn't mean that the school can't foster sharing among the students. Establish official channels for students to share notes, outlines, recordings of lectures (where professors permit it, obviously), and commentary on courses. Is it fair to students that the only way to find out about a professor's class is to happen upon someone who previously took that professor's class?

Think Wiki. Imagine a student-oriented course catalog, which allowed the students to edit details of the course, add commentary, and comment on the styles of various professors. There's a lot of institutional knowledge in the faculty, who are often quite willing to share their opinions. There's a lot of institutional knowledge in the student body, but that knowledge rotates through every 3 or 4 years. Being unable to harness one or both is a horrible shame.

Embrace Syndication

Communication and sharing are going to get a lot of information flowing around. In addition, members of the community are reading and observing a lot, all of which can be tagged and noted by one of the many social networking systems. That data moves around through syndication, and the best way to get information flowing to the appropriate places is to get into it.

Set up aggregators, get feeds going on everything, and get people used to reading from sources that use those feeds. Make it easy for people to subscribe. More importantly, make it easy for people to generate content back into the syndicate.

I might like to know when a new job has been posted to the careers site. Why don't I have a feed for that? The whole community might like to know when an office might be closed, or when a new research article has been published, or when an important date is fast approaching. It's too easy to rely on email, but email clutters everything up, because it sends out a lot of information a lot of people don't care about.

For instance, most staff member probably wouldn't care for a notification when grades for a class have been posted. In fact, it may well be that only students in that class care. Why not give me a place to subscribe to notices about that class? I'll know if the professor's out, I'll know what the reading assignment is, and I'll know when the grades have been posted.

All of this is just picking at the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot of depth in this, a lot more than I've got the time to write up.