What is the Announcement (home) page for?
I’m hoping some sort of community norm will emerge, but I wish to begin with an inclusive notion of what goes here. Given the choice between a site that is too busy and one that is dead and uninteresting, I will choose the former.
This site is run on Wordpress, which is good for many things but is at its heart a blogging platform. Each announcement is really a blog post – but instead of talking about your cat or ranting about the Federal Reserve, you can announce anything of interest to this community. Each new announcement debuts at the top of the page and pushes the older ones down, and is eventually pushed down by newer posts in the manner of the eternal struggle between human generations.
Speaking for myself, I envision these sorts of things as good announcements:
- “Save the Date” - a scientific program is planned with more information to come.
- Here’s the paper we’re going to discuss at this Friday’s meeting (no copyright violations, please — I’m sure the nice people at PEP don’t want their material posted in this way, for example)
- Training program application deadline approaches
- Reminder to RSVP for an event
- A training program is inaugurated or revised (brochure attached)
- Review: Last night’s scientific program was illuminating and lively for the following reasons….
- Our institute is pleased to announce a class is forming to begin in the Fall (and it is/isn’t not too late to join…)
- Lecture/seminar series announced
- Graduation/ congratulations/ lamentations re: accomplishments, deaths, canonization etc
- Call for papers/ proposals/ grant applications
- Book announcements
- Referral service announcments/reminders
I’m thinking the following would NOT be appropriate for the Announcements page — but if there’s demand, we could easily make a home for them on the site:
- Individual practice annoncements: opening/closing/moving etc
- psychotherapy groups forming, accepting referrals, etc
- study groups forming, accepting members, etc
- office space offered or sought
- anything announced by an individual as opposed to announced by an institute, center, etc
I welcome your elaborations and discussion of this.
– Mike “let a thousand flowers bloom” Jolkovski