credit where credit is due
The first presentation I attended was Che Tamahori’s - he spoke about giving credit where credit is due on the web, while babysitting his youngest at the same time.
How do we credit people’s contributions to projects - freelancers, peer recognition, and even just portfolios. There are frameworks for other industries whether it’s awards or Admedia type listings…but how do we fit this together for our industry, especially when there are so many players. There are organisational politics even within web companies - some allow singular credits, whereas others prefer to view it as a group exercise.
What are the ways we can do this - footer links? Metatags? You definitely can’t do it with government sites, but we want to know who did that. There are elaborate metadata standards which exist in different places, e.g. for museum artifacts.
Our job roles are not well-defined…does this complicate matters even further? It is easier for designers and developers to define their effort on the project but what about analysts, project managers, people who aren’t so easily identified?
Che presented some ideas for solutions:
- Registration of participants and roles on a registry
- Credits page which lives on the server and is human readable, as well as being based on XML/web standards or utilising something like OpenID.
Dan had an idea about portfolio validation - adding people from the project to it and they need to accept that relationship. Limited by the frameworks that people use and it does have more credence if it is attached to the site that it relates to.
Who governs the registry and makes rules around situations where for example the website work has been won by another company & what if they are only modifying the site, not doing a full redesign?
Consensus was reached at the end of the session - everyone is pretty interested in the registry and being able to validate their participation in the work we do every day. It’s just now that how that will or can actually happen needs to be identified.
