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Outline for March 3, 1998:
Organizational/Institutional Issues; Three Case Studies
- Institutional identity: independent nonprofit or division of a larger institution?
- Who makes the rules? board, individual employee, volunteers, users? Is this a cause or effect (or both) of the CN's success?
- Who does the work? bureaucracy vs. reliance on volunteers -- what does this mean for the organization's long-term existence?
- "stability": technical, financial, organizational -- always a tradeoff
- the crucial balance of local vs. remote content: remote content is easier to obtain and can bring in more users, but then sends them elsewhere
- life cycle model: growing pains, growth spurt, maturity?, decay -- Is there a discrete point of maturity? If so, when does it occur? Does decay necessarily follow? Should a CN plan for its own demise or assume it will continue indefinitely?
- demand orientation vs. supply orientation: does the CN grow/shrink to meet public demand or monetary supply? The two aren't necessarily linked.
Return to the course syllabus.