Twelve years after its first fledging steps and the establishment of its first online presence, the CGC has a new online home. The site, launched October 27th, seeks to provide an attractive and accessible platform for the to fulfill its mission in facilitating graduate communication support.

Eric Grunwald, director of English Language Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and chair of the CGC’s communications committee, led the effort to create the new website.

“Graduate communications has developed into a field in its own right these past fifteen years, and the CGC, created in 2013, has solidifed its role as the premier torch bearer for the field’s practitioners. The Board was tremendously grateful for the CGC’s pioneering founders and creators of the initial website, but we felt it was time for a web presence that matched the CGG’c current standing and, more importantly, provided a visually more attractive, dynamic, and accessible platform for grad support practitioners to connect and share ideas and resources.

“We in the Committee began about a year ago by reflecting on what the CGC’s mission really is and how a website could not only best facilitate that mission but also serve as a launchpad for further development and growth,” says Grunwald. “So we tried to create a site that makes it easy for CGC members to connect and to share resources, the CGC’s two main purposes.

“It was a lot of fun, and Committee members were fantastic to work with,” Grunwald continues. Board Members-at-Large Melissa Myers (Cornel Univ.) and Heather Boldt (Emory Univ.) have served on the committee, as have Jin Kim Pennell (Univ. of Illinois) and Karen Schwelle (Washington Univ. in St. Louise.) “Everyone devoted a lot of time and great insights to help me pull this thing together.”

Jin Pennell had previously done a significant amount of work setting up and maintaining the resource library on the old site, and she was instrumental in helping design the new resource library. The site also preserves and expands the substantial graduate communication bibliography (on Zotero) that Talinn Phillips, Marilyn Gray, and others put together in the years leading up to 2018.

“Also, now that we have these ongoing monthly and quarterly online gatherings for sharing ideas and advice, we needed a robust, calendar-based platform for those to be easily seen and scheduled,” says Grunwald. “And, of course, to allow for new groups to emerge as people have new inspirations and needs.”

As with the old site, some features are open to everyone, others to CGC members only. The CGC listserv and meetings such as the CGC Chats are open to everyone, as are some resources. Other resources will be behind the membership paywall, depending on whether the authors of those resources–syllabi, assignments, and such–wish the results of their hard work to be available freely to anyone in the world.

The large library of recordings of the keynote addresses from previous Summer Institutes are still available to CGC members, and the new site features a job board that lists current openings in graduate communications support and a spruced up directory, both features also being members-only.

The other main value Grunwald and his team sought to build in was ease of maintenance. “The site is built on WordPress, the commercial version, which is apparently the platform for the majority of new websites these days,” he says. “And it’s quite easy to update once you know how.”

Thus, various people on the Board and on the committees will help keep the site up to date about once per month, rotating news items, curating shared resources and the job board, and managing membership and the online gatherings. “We are an all-volunteer organization, of course, and people are very busy, so we wanted something that could be updated easily so that things don’t languish because it’s too hard to update.”