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Digital Governance
Policy

Digital Governance Policy

Overview

The development of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s website and other official digital properties represents a significant investment and plays a key role in strengthening our online public image. It is, therefore, of vital importance that our community maintains *law.upenn.edu, its subsites, and other public digital properties according to best practices, institutional policies, and at the highest quality possible. With that goal in mind, this document details the online management and governance of our digital environment.

Objective

The objective of this document is to provide collaborative centralized governance for the ongoing development, deployment, delivery, and maintenance of the Law School’s public online presence and to represent our brand consistently across public digital channels through standard processes, roles, responsibilities, and practices.

This objective will be pursued with the school’s underlying strategic priority in mind: to facilitate a user experience that will develop a positive digital relationship with all visitors—particularly current and prospective students, faculty, and staff—providing them with the information they need quickly, easily, and enjoyably.

Governance Structure

The Digital Governance Committee is composed of the Executive Director of Communications (Rebecca Anderson), the Associate Dean and Chief Information Officer (Christine Droesser), Sr. IT Support Manager (Sudeshna Dutta), and members of the Law School community. It is the responsibility of the Digital Governance Committee to set the direction and policies for the School’s public online presence.

Responsibilities of the Digital Governance Committee include:

  • Establish and maintain appropriate policies, processes, and procedures to govern digital strategy and standards for public Law School-branded digital assets
  • Evaluate the effectiveness of policies and standards
  • Ensure compliance with all legal and regulatory standards, including accessibility, security, privacy
  • Authorize global changes to taxonomy, structure, branding, look and feel, navigation, styling, etc., as needed
  • Recommend new templates or changes to existing templates
  • Ensure quality, consistency, and content integrity across digital platforms
  • Facilitate and resolve non-compliance issues

The Digital Governance Committee (DGC) will meet at least once per semester to review any requests from academic and administrative stakeholders for major changes to the Law School website, other digital properties, and/or relevant policies and procedures. They will update Law School Leadership on project plans and disseminate information to their staff and department members, as needed.

Throughout the year, community members are invited to send ideas, requests, problems, and concerns to the Digital Governance Committee via email: websiteupdate@law.upenn.edu. Ideas, requests, problems, and concerns will be logged into a ticketing system and reviewed with the committee on a semester basis.

 

Governance Policies

The Law School’s public online channels exist to showcase the school’s best qualities and to project a positive image of the School to the world; they are strategic assets that carry enormous influence. With a distributed content team managing these sites, guidelines that encourage clarity, accuracy, and consistency are essential to protecting our online image. While designated staff will have access to edit certain portions of the site, create new content, and remove old content, the site and all its subdomains remain the property of the Law School.

Executing Website Updates 

This section defines types of changes to the website and how to collaborate with team members to execute them. Changes are classified into 4 categories: urgent fixes, small changes, medium changes, and large changes.

Subsites

A Subsite is a website hosted under the Law School domain name that bears the school’s name or logo or that otherwise purports to represent the opinions or work of the Penn Carey Law but is not directly part of www.law.upenn.edu.

Subsites must be sponsored (“owned” and “maintained”) by a current faculty member or administrator and be related to a Law School-affiliated research center, program, or initiative.

All new subsites must be approved by the Digital Governance Committee (see below). Subsites must meet the following criteria:

  • Support the Law School’s mission
  • Provide lasting value to the Law School
  • Satisfy an unmet need
  • Have approval from the Digital Governance Committee
  • Have an ongoing staffing and maintenance plan
  • Demonstrate adequate funding to meet start-up and ongoing maintenance costs (if school funding is not available)
  • Register relevant ownership and technical details with ITS and Comms, enabling them to make changes in hosting plans or content, as required or needed
  • Requesting a Subsite
  • To request a new website, administrators should contact websiteupdate@law.upenn.edu and a member of the web team will respond to your request promptly, as conditions allow.

Subsite Content Quality Standards

It is the responsibility of the Site Owner to ensure that content is accurate, up to date, and complies with University guidelines.

To prevent the dissemination of conflicting information, subsites must not duplicate official school information. Rather, they should link to the authoritative source. Official school information includes but is not limited to:

  • Tuition, fees, and scholarship information
  • Academic requirements
  • Academic calendars and deadlines
  • Course descriptions and schedules

Accessibility

All websites must comply with University of Pennsylvania Web Accessibility Standards.

Vendor contracts for web/application development or hosting must conform to WCAG 2.1, Level AA guidelines.

Security

All websites must comply with University of Pennsylvania ISC Security Policies.