Global Text Momentum Report - August 13, 2007

We have moved forward on several fronts during the last few weeks. Important developments include:

• While teaching in Paris, Rick made contact with UNESCO. July was not a good time for visiting UNESCO because many people were on vacation, but we now have a link, and we can start to build a relationship with UNESCO as a result of the initial meeting.
  
• We have now worked for more than a month with Drupal, the content management system (CMS) recommended by Franz Lehner, our CTO, and Michael Scholz, one of his doctoral students. Books in English and Spanish are being uploaded. Michael is very adept as solving issues that we raise very quickly and Drupal has many of the features we need. The test site is http://ocp.uni-passau.de/drupal/
• Craig Piercy, a faculty member at the University of Georgia, and one of my undergraduate students, Kendal Lewis, are working on developing cascading style sheets (CSS) for use with printing books and displaying them on the screen. We will also develop a set of style sheets for authors so that the uploading of files to Drupal is efficient.
• Craig is also going to assign his Internet Technology class, part of a Masters of Internet Technology program, the task of outlining and starting a book on Internet technology.
  
• Don and I, while attending the Americas Conference on Information Systems last week, met with Ted Stohr of the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. Ted has agreed to be Editor-in-Chief of the Global Text Case Collection. In addition, we will be able to seed the collection with cases from Communications of the Association for Information Systems (CAIS). We can also use tutorials from CAIS to start the Global Text Tutorials Library. Anyone want to volunteer to be Editor-in-Chief?
• Please check out the Web site for some new content:
  * An article on Global Text in the August issue of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA) Journal and two podcasts on the In the News page.
  * A listing of participating universities on the Community page.
• Don has received commitments for completion from all chapter editors Business Fundamentals, and some chapter reviewers have been lined up. If you would like to volunteer to review a chapter, please get in touch with Don.
• We expect the first release of Information Systems to be available within four weeks.
• Don and I visited with three large corporate foundations in July and came away with some good ideas on how to frame a case for corporate sponsorships.
  
  

~ Rick