Glendale Community College promotes a distributed web development philosophy: all personnel are encouraged to add to the institution’s Internet presence. As it says in the GCC Web Mission Statement, "Like the library and the classroom, these pages provide space for the voices and viewpoints of many authors." This concept is realized in various departmental and personal web sites, as we hone the skills required of such projects. However, it has become just as important for busy employees to accommodate the Web for more routine communications.

In response to this need, the GCC Innovation Center has pursued Shared Authoring on the Web. The idea is to provide ways to add content to web sites without waiting for web designers or other "middle people" to do it, while also trimming the conventional time and skill demands of web site maintenance. Another purpose of Shared Authoring is to allow many individuals -- even those separated by departments and locations -- to contribute to the same web site, so that their collaboration results in a more information-rich and timely resource than most individuals can maintain on a part-time basis.

By summer of 1999, personnel in several departments, along with Internet users in the general public, had repeatedly expressed to the Innovation Center the need for a web site on which all important events and dates would be combined for viewing in one place. So the first Shared Authoring tool the Innovation Center developed was the Collaborative Calendar program.

Many public calendar web sites already existed: the Training and Employee Development department posted a monthly calendar of employee workshops; the English web site publicized certain cultural events and presentations; the Enrollment Center posted the official academic calendar. These were all manually updated web pages. Many events, though they appeared on posters and flyers, were never publicized on the Web at all. There was no source by which Internet users could tell all of what was going on at GCC in a given day or week.

Now, the campus maintains its most timely and complete Calendar of Events at http://www.gc.maricopa.edu/calendar, through the collaboration of over a dozen employees from several departments, many of whom have never published a conventional web page.

[Proceed to A Description of the Innovation: How the Collaborative Calendar is Maintained.]