Meeting Notes

AASHTO RAC Website Subcommittee Meeting

Monday, February 23, 2015

1:30-2:30 p.m.

Participants:Michael Bufalino, Amy Schutzbach, Natassja Linzau, Allison Hardt, Sue Sillick, Rick Kreider

1. Meeting Minutes from 1/26/15 were approved (Rick, Sue). Natassja will post these notes on the website.

2. Review of Changes from Last Meeting and Other Fixes Requested—In addition to the items from the last meeting, there were a few other needed fixes that we discovered as we were reviewing the site. Unless someone else is indicated as the responsible person, Natassja will implement these changes to the website.

OLD

  • All previous changes to the website were accepted.

NEW

  • The following changes to the Research Needs and Projects page were requested:
  • Clean up formatting (text is different sizes and needs to be the same for all links)
  • On the NCHRP Research for AASHTO Committees page, remove “AASHTO” from Board of Directors link
  • Changes to the Contacts page are noted in #3 below.

3. Contacts Page: There was a lengthy discussion of this page and what we should have on it. Here are some highlights from our discussion.

General Content

A. It was proposed that we move all the content from Staff Listings to the actual Contacts page (Staff Listings is currently a separate page that is linked from the Contacts page). In addition, it was suggested that we restructure the page with headings for each organization and put links to Staff Contacts, etc., below each heading.

Sue volunteered to send out a list of organizations and their contact info that should be included on the Contacts page. The group will provide comments on the list prior to our next meeting.

B. It was proposed that we delete the first four items listed on the Contacts page because they are not technically contacts. These items are: Overview of National Transportation Research, Acronyms Brochure, Directory of UTC Programs by Region, and List of SPR Coordinators. Natassja will make these changes.

C. It was proposed that we move the Acronyms Brochure and the TIG Overview and Home Page links to the Programs page. Natassjawill make these changes.

Acronyms Brochure

A. Allison wasn't able to get the source files from Jennifer but she did convert the PDF to Word format so it can be updated. Amy Schutzbach offered to update the Acronyms. Discussion turned to the Map of Highway Organizations to make sure items were consistent between both of these documents. Update: In correspondence after the meeting, Leni asked about the status and offered assistance from the TKN Task Force.

B. There was some discussion of the potential scope of the Acronyms document, which is currently limited to Highways, aside from listing other CRP programs such as Transit, Airport, Freight, and HazMat. Sue stated she was planning to see if the CRC Council would prepare Map of Organization documents for the other modes. This would help to make sure we have a more a more comprehensive list of acronyms.

C. We discovered that there is another Acronyms and Abbreviations document on the SCOR/RAC website at: We need to consolidate this page with the Acronyms brochure in some way. This will be taken up in a future meeting.

D. There was also discussion of the format of the brochure—if it should be PDF (for printing) or HTML (for online viewing). This issue was tabled pending resolution of other issues about the brochure.

For now, the Acronyms Brochure will be moved to the Programs page. Natassja will make this change.

Publications Notifications Page

A. We were not able to begin our discussion of this page. We need to finalize the content of the rest of the Contacts page first. Once that content is finalized, we will conduct a RAC Survey asking states to update their information for the following resources: Links to State DOT Research Branches, Publications Notifications Page, and State DOT Fact Sheets. It may be more efficient to request updates to these three resources at the same time. This will be determined at a future meeting.

ITEMS FOR NEXT MEETING:

I. Contacts page—Review suggested changes to the page and group comments received from Sue’s email and CONTACTS document.

II. The TRB Participation by State page no longer exists. We need to add info about MyTRB to the list of Contacts, possibly with a link to “Manage My Group/Volunteer Directory”; we will discuss this further at our next meeting.

III. Some questions arose about “outside” groups that RAC members are involved in and how to treat them on the website (i.e., list or don’t list, and if so, where?). Allison offered to bring the issue up at a future meeting of the Admin Task Force.

Here are the possible groups that could be included/listed on the SCOR/RAC website:

  • RAC-CUTC Liaison Group—Should we include their page with the RAC Task Forces? Or where can we put that information? They are already listed in the most recent version of the RAC Task Force Membership Spreadsheet.
  • STRAP—This group is also listed on the current version of the RAC Task Force Membership Spreadsheet.
  • Implementation of NCHRP Results
  • AASHTO SCOR Process Improvement Task Force

IV. Discuss Programs page—content and structure (including Amy’s suggested changes to the page).

PARKING LOT/TABLED FOR FUTURE DISCUSSION:

  • If more funding becomes available:
  • Consider programming to display the date of each survey on its Survey Details page in the RAC Surveys database. Currently there is no date listed on the page.
  • Consider adding a box to the homepage that would be an automatic feed from the RAC Surveys database and would list the 10 most recent surveys, with links to the individual survey details pages. This would remove survey items from the “What’s New” list.
  • The website subcommittee would like to provide feedback to Chris Hedges and Chris Jenks on the layout of the Welcome letterfor new RAC members—it's getting dense. [This will be discussed at a future meeting.]
  • SCOR Roster—Still needs to be addressed, but it was decided to discuss this at a future meeting.
  • Task Force Products and/or Document Libraries—We decided to defer until we have finished our review of the rest of the site before tackling the issue of where these should be housed and/or highlighted. In addition, we want to find a way to preserve the “ownership” of each product, possibly by linking back to the task force that developed each product. In addition, we could potentially include a list of products on each task force page, as well as other relevant places on the site.
  • Calendar of RAC Task Force Meetings, Regional RAC Meetings, National RAC Meetings, and SCOR Meetings—This needs to be discussed further at a future meeting. Possibilities include posting on the RPPM Calendar, using the TRB Calendar, and/or developing a calendar for the SCOR/RAC website.

ADJOURNED. Our next meeting is scheduled forMonday, March 23, 2015, at 1:30 p.m. Eastern time.

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