My mind is buzzing ...

Its 2:30am and my mind is hyper so you will excuse this post if its not making a lot of sense.

As I said earlier, I've been trying to wrap my mind around the 'portal dissemination' problem. There's lots of background stuff that is important but let me jump to what got me excited just now. I was thinking about it in circles just now and Nandita's suggestions added something, and here's where I am:

I can/should actually start thinking about this like a business manager. I have a (ill-defined) problem: disseminate the portal. I realized recently that I actually have a budget for it that is more or less in my control and it could get quite large. I don't have many resources at the moment, but I can hire 1 and I could probably contract a lot of work (but it won't be easy to find the right kind of people). I can break the dissemination up into some chunks -- audience for the multimedia courses and dissemination methods for the multimedia courses, ditto for the Met. Data tool, and Organisational database tool, and how to use the Discussion forums. All of these subtopics have a whole host of ramifications and sub-sub tasks and things to think through. There is a whole separate line of work in improving the portal's visibility on the web -- Google search rank basically. Then we want to do a 'portal on a cd' for posting out cold to people and seeing the response. We are getting a very decent number of hits on the portal but we are not seeing any user feedback at all which we badly need, so we need to better the feedback mechanism mainly (or maybe it is that users don't stay too long on the site which is bad news). There is also this idea of village kiosks (with a computer) that many organizations are implmenting, and there is a lot of interest in getting our content on those kiosks. I'm also tasked with improving the portal itself (like V1.1 onwards of the portal) which is a huge other task in itself. And the list of stuff goes on and on. I feel like I could really spend sometime and setup the framework to think about all this and come up with the strategy and action items, but I wish I had a whole host of people I could delegate off to and just sit back and analyse and control the whole machine :-). I just came up with the name of a good techie friend who could be the perfect person to research some techie tasks of the internet marketing side of the portal, so that's got me all excited. If I could get more people sucked in and make all this stuff start ticking .... I've been feeling occasional pangs that I didn't do an MBA when I should have, but this feels like it could be an MBA education in the real world.


In the middle of all of this, I'm trying to do work for Timbaktu, and the small matter of figuring out what I'm going to do with my life post April, and oh yes the baby thang ...

Good night :-)
Vijay