A headless chook on the loose!

My, my how complex and convoluted university institutions are. Especially if you are trying to change the way they do things.

It has been brought to my attention that universities are extremely hierarchical places and I have come to the realisation that I can’t go about getting things done in the way I had initially thought.

In addition to the things I mentioned in the previous blog, here are a few things I want to execute on behalf of Curtin University:

• - To create a Renren account (Chinese Facebook)
• - To create a Weibo account (Chinese twitter)
• - To put all existing videos on Youku and Tudou (Chinese Youtubes)

This poses many, very large problems; 1 I have to persuade all the important people why these things need to be done, 2 I need to find out what are the legal implications, 3 How can I speed up the process and 4 is my project going to live on once I leave my placement?

As I keep digging around cyberspace I keep finding things that the university has done before that no one knows about. For example Curtin University already has a video with subtitles on Tudou!

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/BV60-QUmdZQ/

So what does that tell me? Due to Curtin University’s extremely hierarchical structure, departments are centralised leading to silos of unintegrated communications as well as projects. This is why it is so difficult to find out what is already out there and so I have to run around talking to many different people from different departments of the university!

In addition to that, this hierarchical system is so complex that I myself am not able to approach decision makers as that would be considered encroaching on their territory and challenging their authority. Therefore I need to work my ideas up through the ranks by slowly getting the people above me on board with my goals. Furthermore this highly bureaucratic system is seriously hindering the implementation and development of any new projects and ideas!

Instead of working towards and finding solutions, the more I work on this project the more questions are uncovered! For example who authorised to put that video on Tudou? Why aren’t the rest of them up there? Why doesn’t anyone know about any of these videos? Why is nobody monitoring the webpage? Does this mean that we don’t need permission to put the other videos up on Tudou and so on.

It has been a very long long week TGIF!

Ivana Stefanovic

13377836

Bentley Campus