Happy December, all! It’s one of my favorite months, when winter is still new and snow is still a treat … and it's also the month of my birthday.
Lately, when I’ve been asked to put in a birthdate on a web form, the day and month menus are generally snappy. But I’ve noticed that the machine typically bogs when it presents the ‘year’ menu, especially *my* year menu.
As I scroll down through those years, I realize, to my own surprise, that I’m approaching my 65th birthday.
I always told myself I would retire, to do whatever I want, when I hit 65. And that’s what I’m going to do as 2025 turns to 2026. As the day draws closer, I realize more and more that I’m really going to miss you all.
I want to thank you for your partnership as we built this extraordinary public communications infrastructure over the past 25 years, and built award-winning content and sites for over 800 units on top of it. With your guidance and support, the content management system and the array of public information apps that surrounds it have evolved to meet nearly every public-communications need of our Big Ten university. Now, the UComm DXG team is building considerable momentum toward a next phase for many apps in our UNL family to bring better user experience by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence.
As always, DXG’s app development approach in the roadmap ahead is to maximize breadth of coverage while minimizing cost — even as that roadmap incorporates AI. Every college, unit and organization at the university requires a website as a front door to their important activities and information. Per-seat costs or exorbitant site license fees for things like event systems or media libraries or CMSes interfere with DXG's primary mission of empowering any member of the university community to communicate effectively to the broad public about their work. This doesn’t change with the advent of AI.
Fortunately, while proprietary models like ChatGPT grab all the headlines, models that are openly and freely shared are gaining in capability. DXG added the AI Captioning feature to MediaHub in 2024 using an open model from OpenAI, and new audio-description feature is in late stages of development using a model via Ollama, a tool that allows many very powerful AI models to be run on premise and privately, in most cases with no costs beyond raw compute. All of this is to say that the future is full of new opportunities for innovation ... which is what makes this work fulfilling and sometimes even fun.
DXG has for some time had a functional distinction between the applications development team and the website development team. And bridging that gap is framework development, which as we all know is critical to the success of our UNL-branded websites and web apps. Going forward, Eric Rasmussen, Aaron Coleman and Ryan Dee will continue to lead each of these respective areas, and Ryan will rejoin the WDN Governance Board as DXG’s third permanent seat, until leadership is fully resolved.
I could start to list all of the people who deserve to be thanked here, and the list would run this article to three times its present length. So, to anyone who ever asked a question in the Web Developer Network, thank you. Anyone who ever served on the WDN Governance Board, thank you. Anyone who ever criticized the efforts of the team, thank you. Communication partners throughout the university, thank you. Website builders, thank you.
The web enterprise at UNL serves more than two thirds of the pages and around 60 percent of the visits of all University System websites combined. UNL.edu is by the numbers bigger than any other public website in Nebraska, including the state government’s. It delivers almost 150 million pages each year. (Preceding data via SimilarWeb and Google Analytics). These numbers say that despite the importance of social media and the rise of AI, the words and images we put on the web remain the authoritative source for information about the university. To illustrate this fact, consider how AI bots gain their “knowledge.” They “train” by absorbing website content. They continuously re-train as that content is updated. AI-driven interfaces will increasingly provide a summary or a guided search result, but the facts shared in that result will be pulled from your websites, and the ‘good’ AI bots will suggest your sites for more information.
Your websites will remain the authoritative source for information about our university, so thank you all again for your past and future partnership and dedicated work to make them the best they can be.
Finally, a word of advice as I prepare to step off of the security of a monthly salary: max out your retirement plans at the university. Just do it before you think of your monthly budget. Pay your future self first.
Bob
A retirement reception for Bob Crisler, director of the Digital Experience Group within University Communication and Marketing, is 3 to 5 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 11 at the Wick Alumni Center.
More details at: https://news.unl.edu/article/crisler-retirement-reception-is-dec-11