Penn Web Standards

The problem

Penn runs thousands of sites across its schools and centres, each with its own vendor, its own analytics, and its own idea of what “accessible” means. A standard only works if it arrives as support rather than enforcement.

The Community of Practice

The most useful thing we built is not a document. It is a room. Penn’s Web Community of Practice brings together the people who actually maintain the university’s sites — communicators, editors, developers, marketers, one or two people who inherited a Drupal site and a prayer — across schools that otherwise never talk to each other.

I program and host it. That means choosing the topic, finding the person who can speak to it, building the deck, opening the call, setting the question everyone answers in the chat, and then getting out of the way so the room can talk. Some months that is a presentation; some months it is breakout rooms and a single prompt. The agenda comes from what people are actually stuck on — the consent banner nobody can configure, the audit that came back worse than expected, the vendor who promised WCAG and did not deliver.

It has grown past one hundred members. That number is the achievement: a hundred people across a decentralised institution who now have somewhere to ask, and who trust each other enough to answer honestly.

What the work looks like

I sit in the working sessions where the standard gets written, tested against real sites, and then explained to the people who have to implement it — including introductory sessions for the Provost’s Office and EVP communicators.

Why it matters

Writing the rule is the easy part. Making a centuries-old, decentralised institution able to follow it is the actual problem — and it is mostly a communication problem wearing a technical costume. A hundred people who trust each other beats a policy nobody reads.