Have you ever watched as a tiny spider begins to spin its web? It starts in the centre and expands its wonderful artwork row-by-row. What has that got to do with developing a "knowledge and information sharing platform", you ask? Quite a lot, actually! And we were able to experience this live in a .digital office workshop.

Time for secretaries and administrative experts to get networking!

TU Wien is too big and has too many employees to be able to meet up with everyone directly and share information. Staggered attendance and different hours of work – exacerbated by measures taken during the pandemic – don't necessarily favour networking and sharing information with one another, either. In addition to this, it is clearly desirable to collaborate with other secretaries and administrative experts on gathering important changes and information together in one place and sharing this with others. We heard the same feedback, again and again, even from HR Development's Secretary's Congress, where this networking concept also took centre stage. A good enough reason to take up this networking concept and use it to build something: a common knowledge and information sharing platform for secretaries and administrative experts in the institutes, Dean's Offices and the central departments at TU Wien.

An initial workshop to get the ball rolling

Sixteen committed colleagues accepted our first invitation and completed pioneering work. Together in one workshop, they developed ideas to act as the basis for content on this new knowledge and information sharing platform. Topics were collected, prioritised, pooled and clarified. In future, this will allow us to share guidelines, guides, templates, reference works and procedural instructions. It should also be possible to ask each other questions and answer them in the community – you don't have to keep reinventing the wheel!

Listening to each other's experiences was an essential part of the workshop too, plus put everyone in a good mood! The topics we dealt with now provide a basis on which to build. At this point, we would like to thank all those who took part, it was a great workshop!

Next stop: depth and detail

Those who took part know that this workshop merely opened the door to getting together to build and breathe life into a knowledge network. Other dates will be arranged where we will delve more deeply into existing topics, as well as including new material. And our knowledge and information sharing platform should also expand steadily, just like the centre of our tiny spider's web. If you would like to be involved in taking the next steps and helping us to establish this knowledge network, then get in touch with us right away – we will then keep you informed about what happens next. Use the #.digital channel to send us a TUchat message or send an informal e-mail to digitaloffice@tuwien.ac.at. We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!