Try out the Demo Site

If you would like to give the gslounge.com demonstration site a go as an anonymous user, just visit it now.

If you'd like to visit the site and see what a student might see next year, log in with the following username and password: gstest, gstest. Look around, kick the tires! Can you find the forum? Make a blog post! Let me know what you think by email or by using the feedback form.

Thanks,

Brody

Nicolle: Gslounge.com Content Director

I have created the unofficial role of Content Director for gslounge.com. The Content Director will be in charge of all site content. Everything a visitor sees on the site is the responsibility of the Content Director. All questions and ideas about content will go to the Content Director as well as the responsibility to specify pages that need to be created that will be useful to the student body. I have appointed Nicolle Rountree to be our first ever Content Director.

Nicolle has already begun work on this and has created this spreadsheet to track ideas for pages with strong relevance toward the General Studies student body.

You can reach Nicolle by email as well as on the Facebook.

Congratulations Nicolle :-)

Brody

Host Reliability - Dreamhost Shared Hosting

I have begun a long term uptime monitoring test of the shared hosting of Dreamhost, the host I'd like to move gslounge.com. I am using three uptime monitoring services: Siteuptime.com, Alertra and Wormly. The test version of gslounge.com is currently in the shared hosting at dreamhost. This morning the shared hosting there suffered a twenty minute outage for database reasons.

Let's say there are roughly 525,960 minutes in a 365.25 day year. Per year then:

• 99.999% uptime would give us 525,954 minutes of uptime, or 6 minutes of downtime
• 99.99% uptime would give us 525,907 minutes of uptime, or 53 minutes of downtime
• 99.9% uptime would give us 525,434 minutes of uptime, 8.76 hours of downtime

This list clearly shows that shared hosting on Dreamhost, even if we start counting today, isn't in the "5 9's" category. Continued monitoring may well reveal shared hosting isn't in the four or three nines category of reliability either.

1% downtime works out to around 3 days of downtime per year. How much downtime can gslounge.com handle before students are turned off? My personal answer is that my tolerance for downtime relates directly to how much I rely on the service. GMail downtime kills me but I forgive the service because how superior it is to competitors - and how hard it would be for me to switch to another service.

The sweet spot here is to make gslounge.com as compelling as possible and simultaneously work to find the most rock-solid host (at the best price) as possible. I am not sure how to find other hosts with great uptime other than testing them myself using my hosted pages within their server farm. Anyone have any great ideas?

Thanks,

Brody

Calendar Working Group Kick-off

I just sent out questions to the eight founding members of the Calendar Working Group to help us begin our task of bringing fresh, relevant calendaring to the undergraduate students of Columbia University. Here are the questions, if you have a response, please email me or comment, any and all ideas are welcome.

• What is calendaring success in the 2007-2008 school year?
• Specific ways you hope to work with the CWG to achieve this success?
• What do think a non-goal of the CWG should be?
• Do you know of an example of great calendaring the CWG could learn from?
• Specific dates that are critical to calendaring success for your organization?
• What's the answer to a calendaring related question you wish I would have asked?

Thanks,

Brody

GSLounge Demo Site Updates

The latest changes to the demonstration site:

• Created an Orientation page
  
• Forum topics and comments are now only visible to authenticated users (following a suggestion from Dean Stellini)
  
• User log-in user interface placed in header rather than left side-bar
• Left side-bar links to Calendar, Blogs, Forum and Feedback (same links are now also located in the header)
• Users applying for gslounge.com accounts are now limited to email addresses of the following format: *@columbia.edu or *@*.columbia.edu
  
• ex.
  
• foo@columbia.edu
• bar@cs.columbia.edu
• Updated the Resources links to actually point to the Academic Calendar etc.
• Enabled the Site Contact page so anonymous and authenticated users can contact the Communications Team about anything they wish.
  

Following these directions I created the first database backup:

• mysqldump -u db_drupal -p -h data.skaftafell.net gs_drupal > ../db_backups/06032007_nodeaccess.back

Forum access was limited to authenticated users through the Nodeaccess module for Drupal. The anonymous user can see that a forum exists but they can't go deeper than that.

Nodeaccess controls which users can access certain paths. Nodeaccess, though under only prototype development for Drupal 5.1, is what I am hoping to use in order to limit access by anonymous users to sensitive areas of gslounge.com starting with the Forums.

Enabling Nodeaccess:

• ssh to host of Drupal installation
  
• wget http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/drupal/files/projects/nodeaccess-5.x-1.x-dev.tar.gz
• gzip -dc nodeaccess-5.x-1.x-dev.tar.gz
• mv nodeaccess modules
• From the Drupal admin control panel admin/build/modules
• Enable Nodeaccess
• Update node access permissions
• Administer/User Management/Nodeaccess
  
• "Forum Topic"
• Remove "view" permission from "anonymous user"
• Save Grants
• To complete this task, I wrote a message to anonymous users trying to view forums instructing them to login or register in order to read/comment on forums.
  

Thanks,

Brody

Lessons Learned: Seniors.gslounge.com

On May 7th, Jason, outgoing senior class president requested that a forum be setup for seniors to share information about events happening around campus and the city related to graduation and for activity partners. I built the site because of the need, but also because it could serve as a good case study about why or why not a forum works.

Here is the site traffic for http://seniors.gslounge.com:


As you can tell, traffic spiked the day the site was announced and then went into a fast, smooth fall back down to zero. Other than myself and Jason, only one other person posted to the forum although there were many views of forum topics.

From my perspective I think we have learned several things:

• Students don't go to forums for activity partners, they do that in person or on Facebook
• A forum with no links other than from this blog and a single email from Jason will die
• A forum with only a single, highly specialized topic for a small audience will die
• A forum isn't the ideal spot for news

We also learned a lesson stated by Deans Stellini and Rodgers:

• "Building it doesn't mean they will come.
  

This is another way of saying that just because we go through the effort to make something, that students will hear about it, understand it, participate in it and then value it.

Let me try and state the opposite of these lessons as guidelines for the new gslounge.com forums:

• Forums will be for discussion of news, politics or other topics
• Forums will be linked to from:
• Other areas of gslounge.com
• Blogs on gslounge.com
• Regular email messages from the Communications Team
• Undefined external sites
• Forums will have topics designed to appeal to a large audience
• Forums will not be used to break news for the student body

An attempt to make a positive re-statement of the Stellini/Rodgers lesson:

• If you carefully tweak it and keep trying to make it relevant, then, perhaps, just maybe, they might show up and start using it
  

Thanks,

Brody

Calendar Working Group

Fresh, accurate calendaring is, by consensus, one of the biggest priorities to the efforts for the next version of gslounge.com. Students, on and off campus become more involved when they can dependably locate interesting academic and social programming.

The same calculus has been apparent to leaders of other undergraduate councils around campus as well. Because of the enthusiastic interest from these councils and the manifestation of political and technical will around the topic I have established the Calendar Working Group.

The CWG will be composed of individuals from the undergraduate councils interested in lending their intellectual and technical abilities to the purpose of giving the students of Columbia University and Barnard College the best online calendaring possible. I will also be inviting certain members of the Columbia University Administration I know would be interested in participating.

Look forward to updates from the CWG here on this blog.

Thanks,

Brody

Original GSLounge.com Retirement

Amit is updating the DNS entries for gslounge.com some time tonight. This means that the numerical address for the site will go from pointing to the current host to a new, temporary host. This is an intermediary step toward taking full control of the domain.

Next steps:

1. Confirm the DNS update has been made by seeing that http://gslounge.com loads a new placeholder page.
   
2. Conclude the domain transfer by officially transferring ownership of the domain from Amit to myself.
3. Follow B-Form procedure to pay for a permanent host
   
4. Move the domain from the temporary host to the permanent host where it will stay during the school year.

Note: This change is the end of the original GS Lounge. Long Live the Original GS Lounge! The DNS update will result in the original gslounge.com site being replaced entirely. The old content will remain at the old host and as of today there are no plans to migrate *any* of that content to the new host. If there is content you'd like to have migrated let me know.

Thanks,

Brody

Communications Project Management

The Communications Team officially kicked off our summer session work today. We began our work with a phone meeting and by launching our project management site. To manage our work we selected the Basecamp hosted project management solution from 37Signals.

Basecamp will allow us to track milestones, projects, task-lists, share files, assign work and more. We selected it because it is hosted, fast, simple and crucially, it is free*.

Thanks,

Brody

* It is also written in Ruby and rocks Rails/Ajax like a hurricane

Facebook as Platform

A portion of students in General Studies use the Facebook. Some have said that it was essential to the recent student council elections, while others point out that there are students intentionally not involved in it and therefore it shouldn't be the only way students are messaged. Either way, students have voted for Facebook with their mouseclicks and the company now offers tools for software developers like myself to hook into the functionality they offer and to build additional functionality. This new Facebook software platform may be compelling enough to cause us to invest in actually building on the platform. I will have to learn more about it.

Here is an article from TechCrunch about the release.
Here is a recent article from Money/CNN.com regarding the new development release.

An example of a new application built into Facebook.

Thanks,

Brody

Gslounge.com Domain Transfer

Amit, the outgoing VP of Communications 06'-07', has begun the process of transferring the gslounge.com domain over to me. I am working to get him the personal and technical information he needs in order to make that happen. Also I have begun the process of working with Dean Stellini to select and pay for a domain host.

Thanks,

Brody

Undergraduate Council Cooperation

This week Paula K. Cheng President of The Activities Board at Columbia, Jonathan Siegel Chair of the Student Governing Board and Michelle Diamond all expressed interest in sharing information across our technology investments between councils. I have begun to think about how I can include this collaboration in the plans for gslounge.com and started to pencil in calls/meetings/email for next week.

The consensus is that the councils point to a centralized calendar of events and that links between sites be made. I am open to ideas and look forward to conversations.

Thanks,

Brody

Email Alias Action Update

As noted previously, I have begun to work to update and manage the GSSC and GSIDEA email aliases. Dean Stellini indicated that CUIT manages both the aliases. To update them, one must be the owner, and the owner can either be the GSSC President or a person the President delegates to. Niko delegated the task to me so I am going to work with Dean Stellini and CUIT to point the aliases to the correct people.

The second problem is that GSSC and GSIDEA both get a small, but annoying amount of spam. I have solicited ideas about how former council members feel about this spam. I will take action based on their ideas when I begin working with CUIT.

Thanks,

Brody

Internship Started

I began my internship today. I will be writing software for a tiny software-startup in Seattle - Jott.com. I selected them because they are unique in several ways. They are a startup that has a product that works, and that I used and made part of my life but most importantly they are located in Seattle, where my brand-new baby niece was born three months ago. Not only can I spend a few months in my home-town near my family but I can also write software with a bunch of great people building something useful.

Thanks,

Brody

Gslounge.com Demo 5/11/2007

This is a demonstration of what the ideas for the gslounge.com website from students, council and administrators might look like next year. There are two versions of the video, the high quality version (30mb) or the low quality YouTube version:



Thanks,

Brody

Email Aliases

The council related email aliases need to be updated. They point to the people in office last term. I have begun working with Dean Stellini who has contacts in CUIT to make the update happen. I don't know how long this will take until I hear back from the Dean. Thanks to Amit and Gabrielle for getting me this far.

Thanks,

Brody

Comm ideas from Chikodi

Chikodi is the incoming 07'-08' Senior Class President and one of the three people who helped found the original gslounge.com. As such, he took a moment to share with me some of the original goals for the project and his ideas for the next implementation.

06'-08' gslounge.com goals:

• Meeting place for students to voice their ideas
• A method to reach a broad audience in General Studies
• Revenue: video resumés for prospective employers

Ideas for the next version of the site:

• Podcasts, playlists and streaming audio
• Eyeballs are all about content, we need as many people creating content as possible
• Each council member advertising their section of the website
  

Thanks,

Brody

Comm ideas from Dean Rodgers

Dean Rodgers is a crucial figure in the General Studies administration from the communications point of view and has a very long job-title: "Dean of Admissions, Enrollment Management and Commnications"

I spoke to him Tuesday at his office on campus in Lewisohn.

His goals for communication with the Student Council:

• Frequent, regular meetings
• Direct communication with the VP of Communication
  
• Work together with the council even there isn't agreement on all issues
  
• Council President blog is fresh with ideas, goals and thematic direction
  
• Policy committee publishes all their work, including face to face meetings and research assignments, in addition to resolutions
• More communication about work on politically sensitive, behind the scenes projects
  

His goals for communication with prospective General Studies Students:

• "Continue your story"
• Help them understand who GS students are today

His ideas for communication from gslounge.com

• Blogs listed on a map, where links are at the location of the author's hometown
• Students blogging about the every day GS experience (the commute, classes, studying...)
  

Things he is concerned about from gslounge.com

• Poorly written articles (bad grammar reflects badly on everyone)
• Harmful characterizations of individuals or the student body
• Broken links
• The "build it and they will come" mentality, must get message out and buy in from many audiences before people will show up and actually use the site

Thanks,

Brody

Aside: History of the GS Website

Recently I have been asked about the difference between the official General Studies website and the website for Continuing Education. Anyone can tell from a moments glance at the two pages that they are totally different. Why?

The question arises because both GS and CE are run by the same dean, Dean Awn. After that, all connection and similarity vanishes. Where GS has a small communications staff, CE has a substantial one and may even have an in-house web developer. Another side of the answer is the history of the GS website itself.

The site was authored and hosted by an enthusiastic but technically limited company in the midwest. The project began in 1998, went live in 1999 and was revised in 2000. Other than a recent cosmetic update, structurally, the site has remained largely unchanged. This is because of the limited staffing, the host and because of the challenges of producing a website with so many stakeholders across the university.

Thanks,

Brody

In Seattle

I am in Seattle as of now. I am available on all the usual communication methods but I prefer email. During my time in Seattle I'll be visiting my family, working a software developer internship and doing all the background technology grunt-work for next year's site.

Have a great summer,

Brody

Comm ideas from Dean Scola

Today I met with Dean Scola and her assistant Robert, who is himself a GS student.

Dean Scola is the Assistant Director of Communications for the School of General Studies reporting to Dean Rodgers. Dean Scola is responsible for the GS website, print ads in the New York Times and semi-annual publications like The Owl. Her time is spent shaping the image of General Studies in the public mind and mitigating damage to that image. She also handles direct inquiries from the press regarding individual students.

Her communications ideas center on freshness, relevance and responsibility. The website needs a fresh, accurate calendar, not the weather report, no matter how accurate it is. The website needs to balance the fact that the content creators are GS students taking classes with the requirement of fresh material at all times. A majority of the students live off campus. The website should be a hook to allow these students to make the most of their time when they are on campus or wish to socialize with other students.

Content produced should be responsible. Responsible to the legacy of the student creating it, toward the School of General Studies and ultimately Columbia University itself. Controversy is fine, but it people creating it should be well known, not anonymous and always mindful of the larger circles their online communication works within.

Thanks,

Brody

Book: Drupal Pro Development

Just got a new book in the mail: Drupal Pro Development. This title will hopefully give me more insight into how Drupal runs and help me provide some of the more advanced requests from the council.

Thanks,

Brody

07' Seniors Special Request: Forum

Jason Dixon, 07' Senior Class President sent me a special request today. He wanted to create a forum where seniors can read about upcoming graduation related events. He wants them to read about events, but also to post about their planned participation. Ideally the forum will improve event subscription.

I have created the forum for Jason at http://seniors.gslounge.com Once he creates an account and begins posting it will be 100% live. As practice ahead of the future version of gslounge.com I couldn't ask for a better project. I look forward to listening to user feedback and making improvements. As I build the next generation demo for the upcoming GSSC meeting, I'll keep these thoughts in mind.

Thanks,

Brody

Gslounge.com Domain Registration

The gslounge.com domain registration expires on October 17th, 2007. To continue using the domain we must extend our registration with a registrar. Anyone willing to bet on any domain registrar taking the B-Form?

This leads to a larger observation: The B-Form seems to be designed for handling billing to Columbia University departments and businesses physically located on campus or in NYC. These vendors are typically catering related. For scenarios requiring physically distributed vendors with little connection to the university the B-Form seems to be a non-viable option. This is precisely the scenario Communications has to deal with in order to procure online services.

Thanks,

Brody

Dreamhost and the B-Form

I have begun the procedure to see if Dreamhost will accept the B-Form as payment. I sent their sales team an email introducing myself and my goal. Ideally they'll get back to me Monday and we'll be off and running. They have steep discounts for hosting non-profits, so we should be able to obtain excellent hosting, and high-quality support for a minimum of expenditure.

Thanks,

Brody

Some Nerd Humor

Today I began working on a paper about a piece of art at the Museum of Modern Art. I went online to learn more about it and found that MoMa stores artist information in a ... dadabase.

Oh they kill me! :-)

Brody

Study Period

It is currently the study period ahead of finals at Columbia. As such, you can expect a reduced amount of posting to the blog. Best of luck on all your papers, projects, presentations, speeches, models, experiments, or anything else :-)

Thanks,

Brody

Welcome Nicolle

Today I invited Nicolle to join the blog. She was recently elected Delegate-at-Large. Her observations about Communications and technology are crisp and clear. I believe her writing will resonate with the readership of the blog.

She is going to start by offering assessments of other websites around Columbia. Recently she went through a long list of sites and found things to like or things to improve in many.

Welcome Nicolle :-)

Brody

What is a "demo" exactly?

A question just came in from a reader:

"What would your presentation consist of? What is a defined demo?"

Response:

The presentation would be a short period of time (5-10 minutes max). First I would describe what features students, council members and administrators have expressed interest in. Then I would use a computer, keyboard and mouse with an internet connection (ie. the demo is live) to show how students, council members or visitors would use the site.

At the end of the demonstration council members should feel that progress is being made and that they have a clear idea about how they would use the site. Students and administrators should feel like they understand how they would participate in the site. Everyone should understand how the demo does or does not reflect the input I have received so far.

For students who can't actually be at the demo I am thinking about making a screencast.

If you have a feature you really want to see in the demo let me know.

Thanks,

Brody

Software Installation Document

For those of you interested in following the scintillating details behind deploying Drupal to Dreamhost for the shakedown, this document will be continuously updated as I go through the process.

Install and Configure Drupal with Dreamhost

Thanks,

Brody

Test Site Shakedown

I spent the evening installing, deploying and configuring a test site using Drupal. I deployed it on my personal hosting at Dreamhost and found the experience to be pleasant and refreshing.

This shakedown period will involve multiple deployments and configurations in order to become familiar with the technology in the configurations the council, students and groups have shown interest in. Figuring out what is or isn't possible and what is or isn't easy will happen during this shakedown period. Configuration also includes planning and setting up different types of users and making various sections of the site public, private or some combination of the two.

Shakedown has two deliverables: a demo at the Council meeting before summer and complete deployment/configuration directions. As yet the demo is undefined. Your ideas for the demo are encouraged.

Thanks,

Brody

Comm ideas from Michael

This evening I attended the first meeting of the 07'-08' student council. Our goal was to share ideas for spending next year. Each person at the meeting handed out their proposals in paper form. I found one bullet point, written by Michael, particularly relevant to Communications:

GSSC must step up and take the role to provide the most relevant and accessible information to the GS community. GS Lounge must become the one place that all GSers can get all their information that they may need. Everything from events, academic issues, who's who, policies, guidelines, resources etc. Must be updated daily. The goal is to create a site so comprehensive and simple to navigate that a majority of GSers will visit it at least once a day. If we create a place where students will regularly go for information we have a reliable way of reaching the community.

This sets a high bar and one that eloquently expresses the general consensus about the site. One question is how we are going to produce this content and keep it fresh. Who is willing to join me to step up to creating the content that we and all the students need on a daily basis?

Thanks,

Brody

The Spectator

I recently spoke with Jesse, the GS student who is also the "beat-chief" covering General Studies. He attends all the council meeting. You can see his work in the Columbia Spectator.

Jesse feels communication can be improved based on numerous interviews with students. During the recent election he found that students don't know what the student council does. They also didn't understand who was running or what candidates stood for. Even though students have no idea what the council is up to, he found that they do believe the council matters in general, and in particular, to the quality of student linfe. One idea he had for improving the sense of connection between the student body and the council was one council meeting a month in the lounge.

He believes that students want information from the council through email and The Facebook but that both have drawbacks. The weekly email can become overly long and The Facebook doesn't have much reach across the General Studies student body. Proof of this last point might be that Gabrielle has only 900 friends - when we all know that if every GS student were on The Facebook she'd have friended far more :-)

Thanks,

Brody

The B-Form

Outgoing VP Finance gave me a B-Form (Budget Authorization Form) last night. The B-Form is what an event programmer uses to apply and then pay for an event.

The fields of the form are straightforward (ex: Expenditure Amount, Payee, Expenditure Authorized By...), but the copious fine-print is not. As I read through the fine print I see that in addition to the "normal" protocol a programmer uses the B-Form to follow there are exceptions. Expenses under $50 can be paid with cash on hand. Expenses over $500 must be accompanied by multiple bids.

Another problem is that a physical B-Form is what gets handed to a vendor so they can mail it into Columbia for processing. Building this online will definitely require care in order to conform to Columbia University Finance requirements.

Thanks,

Brody

Online Programming Applications

Many people have expressed an interest in putting the process event programmers use to request permission and budget for events online. At tonight's GSSC meeting this was also mentioned by 06'-07' VP-Finance Park. To follow up on this I have sent a request to the incoming VP-Finance Hightower to provide me with the control flow involved so I can start figuring out how it might be implemented.

The idea is to simplify the challenging task of programming by removing the need to hold each person on the E-board accountable for required steps in the approval process for each event. In other words, Sally programmer should submit a description, date and budget for an event online, and then focus on selecting quality vendors, and creating effective messaging rather than personally chasing down E-board members to get them to say or email "yes" or to fill out some form in triplicate.

Putting this process online will not be a panacea. Clearly though the approach offers possibility for improvement. I am requesting information because I believe we can improve our situation. The goal is improvement, not an instant fix. Once a system is in place, continuous, detailed feedback from programmers and E-board members will be essential to tailoring it to our needs. Everyone involved will benefit from a more streamlined process, particularly students, who could see more frequent and higher quality events with a better programming application system.

Thanks,

Brody

Congratulations GSSC 06'-07'

Tonight was the final council meeting of the 06'-07' General Studies Student Council. I want to echo the sentiment expressed by Niko to close the meeting - that all of us who ran for leadership roles in the recent election did so because of the shining examples set by this council. I absolutely agree and am proud and nervous to be following in their footsteps.

Thank you all,

Brody

Comm ideas from Dean Karahalios

I just spoke with Dean Karahalios to open a channel with her so that when she hears something about communication she can email me.

She spoke to me about new students to GS, that, in addition to being from out of state were also new parents. She pointed them to the Parents group but for whatever reason it wasn't clear what the Parents group was up to and how the students could participate.

The lesson here is that we need to shorten the distance students have to go to involve themselves - or to partake in services, and activities already scheduled. People want to participate. We need to make sure that each group has all possible tools required to retain these new potential members.

Thanks,

Brody

Comm ideas from Dean Stellini

Does everyone know that Dean Stellini has like a 14ft tall window in his office? Awesome.

Ok, onto the action: This afternoon I spoke with Dean Stellini for the first time about his thoughts on communication between the GSSC and the student body and introduced him to some of my directions and goals.

Dean Stellini's number one message about communication:

• Communication between the student body and the GSSC must improve

He suggests this might happen through frequent, fresh, relevant and easy to find minutes, agendas, surveys and town halls. He hopes that gslounge.com can become a way for more of the student body to offer instant critical feedback to the GSSC. Provided we meet his high standards, I think this is within the range of possibility.

I believe that Dean Stellini's emphasis on gathering active feedback from students points to the need to make a new, and special effort in this area. I am not sure what that effort would look like, but I am hoping that online forums are one answer.

An extremely interesting subject Dean Stellini mentioned was that a few years ago the GS administration put together a bulletin board for the student body that failed. Students never posted. He's not sure why. I will be asking around to hopefully learn enough to avoid pitfalls.

Finally, Dean Stellini wants the blogs of GSSC elected officials to be readable by anyone on the web. He feels that they represent an intelligent, vibrant voice to the student body and by extension, the public. By contrast, he feels that discussions, which are less structured and more challenging to moderate, should be private. Additionally he wants to make sure that all items that end up on the site calendar are official GSSC events or other officially approved events. He is exactly right; blogs should be public and student forums private and that all events should be 100% approved according to our constitution before they land on the calendar.

The next two weeks: Dean Stellini and I will meet before the end of the school year. We hope to meet with Dean Curtis Rodgers and Dean Allison Scola to talk about technical topics like WIND, problem escalation paths, and how they would like communication to improve from their point of view.

Thanks for reading and thanks for Dean Stellini for welcoming me with such great information and assistance,

Brody

ps. Dean Stellini and I spoke about WIND, but I am going to break that out into a separate post.

College CMS: Yalestation.org

Niko just found YaleStation.org, the Yale community portal.

From the About page :

YaleStation was conceived by founder and then-freshman Alexander Clark in September 2000.

That means they have had a dedicated team of developers working on this site for seven years. It's an interesting site with a lot of visual content that cues from what you might see in real life, such as the use of poster icons as they might appear on a real college bulletin board.

My theory is that there are a huge number of these sorts of systems in the wild. We just need to figure out which one offers enough promise to cut the search off and begin investing in the platform.

Thanks,

Brody

Google Apps?

I just watched a video demonstrating the capabilities of Google Apps - where Google basically puts all of their services on your domain. Users of gslounge.com, in this case, would check their email using a GMail interface, and calendar using GCal etc.

There are strong benefits to the Google Apps approach: no software installation, upgrade and maintenance, they would handle login to our domain and because the start page is iGoogle it would be entirely customizable for every student. Because of the hosting we'd get a huge amount of storage space for no extra cost and very good system uptime. Students could also customize their homepage with the iGoogle widgets.

But some drawbacks come to mind. Using Google Apps would almost create a parallel universe of email address, calendaring and document sharing from the Columbia University system. And frankly, who needs another email address? How would we integrate the heavily requested blogging, forum and survey features? And how do we handle single sign-on between the Google Applications, the blogging and forum applications we add later and WIND? And not least: how do we qualify gslounge.com as an "educational institution" in order to not pay $50 per user? It's also not clear how we could use the gslounge.com homepage to advertise the groups and individuals who contribute to the site. Once a user signs up, how would they be notified that the international club has a party schedule for Friday night?

Your thoughts?

Thanks,

Brody

Feedburner

This evening I spent a couple hours hooking up a blog to FeedBurner, a site that allows bloggers to track the reach of their blog. FeedBurner allows users to anonymously count visitors, subscribers, browsers, and when and where visitors accessed the site from.

Any blog or podcast can be set up to use FeedBurner. The advantage for Communications would be that we could closely track what content on gslounge.com is interesting to the readership. We could track how many people are reading forums but not actually posting (ex. lurkers: visitors who read but never write posts or replies) or even see how many students are checking the online calendar. Tracking readership is important in order to make sure the site is working for the audience.

Thanks,

Brody

ps. For those of you who love GMail as much as I do, check out this Firefox extension that makes GMail even more useful.

Drupal Book

Tonight I visited the best espresso shop in Union Square and then cruised over to Barnes & Noble and grabbed a book about Drupal. I have already read about half the book and am mostly looking for ways we can leverage site log-in with WIND authentication.

If you have a blog or community, what type of users will your audience be? Current students? Alumni? Graduate students? The public?

Thanks,

Brody

Comm ideas from Todd

This morning I went to the GS Leadership Appreciation breakfast and had a chance to speak with Todd Murphy. Like myself, Todd is a current Delegate at Large for Communication.

Todd has two main ideas:

• Accounts, once created, must never be lost
• UNI log-in will encourage use

During this semester accounts have been lost at least once. There has been interesting research done about teenagers having no problem with account loss lately, but that audience clearly isn't the typical GS student. Gslounge should never delete accounts.

Account deletion and other instability are symptoms of both technology and process problems. It seems like current, open source CMS solutions like Joomla are prone to breaking. In fact, the first piece of advice for people installing Drupal is:

"Never try anything for the first time on a live site. Use a test site that uses the same modules and same data (different database)." - Drupal Cookbook

Administering the site without testing or backup is a process failure. Site backup and testing is a development best practice. It and other best practices will need to be defined and enforced in order for the site to avoid downtime as much as possible.

As far as UNI log-in I am meeting with Dean Stellini Monday to meet him for the first time and get the ball rolling on WIND, the technology required to allow UNI log-in. The challenge first is beauracratic: getting CUIT to allow WIND authentication for gslounge.com. The second challenge is figuring out if we need accounts on gslounge.com, and if so, how we are going to handle accounts native to the platform (ie. Joomla or Drupal) vs. accounts native to WIND.

I agree with Todd that the continuity of gslounge is essential to success. I am interested to see how we can make WIND work on the site given the different needs of various individuals and groups who'll be using it.

Thanks,

Brody

Gslounge.com

Common observations from students about gslounge.com:

• Stale
• Obfuscated
• Irrelevant

Students want to share content. The site makes that super tough. The result is that gslounge.com has become irrelevant: after an early spike of interest at the beginning of both semesters, people stopped visiting because new content either isn't posted or because it is impossible to find.

Is the software on gslounge.com making our lives easier? No. Presently gslounge.com is running a Content Management System (CMS) called Joomla. I am looking at Joomla and competitors like Drupal to see how we can improve the ease of use of gslounge.com. I am going to compare and contrast what these systems could offer us. In the days ahead I'll publish a point by point comparison of leading content management solutions.

I am not wedded to content management per se. Could we get away with simply using Blogger, Google Calendar, GMail, Google Groups, Google Docs and YouTube? Perhaps. In recent days the election involved thousands of visits to a student blog hosted by Blogger with videos hosted on YouTube - clearly the model works. Blogger allows us to host blogs on gslounge.com itself. We could instantly harness that basic blogging feature within our site for anyone who'd like to participate.

There is more to gslounge.com than blogging though. What about integration? (ex. telling the main page that the social chair just posted a cool interview with a student) What about the different uses the site will be put to? (ex. Programmers using webforms to inform Communications about events). I need to understand how we can mix and match these technologies to provide what we need.

In conclusion, gslounge.com is broken. Students don't use it and therefore it must be fixed. Investigating the technologies mentioned above and continuing to hear your great ideas will help us understand where we need to take the site.

Thanks,

Brody

Questions to Readers

Dear Reader,

As I survey the pieces of technology we might implement I want to get a grasp of what type of technologies people are familiar with. If you could email me or comment about whether you are aware of the following that would be helpful.

Thanks,

Brody

• RSS
• PDF
• AJAX
• CGI
• Jpeg
• Subdomain
• Blog
• URL
• Server
• Site
• Page
• Database
• Craigslist
• Google Maps
• Survey Monkey
• Google Docs
• YouTube
• Link

Comm Ideas from Susannah

During the preparation for the Virginia Tech vigil last night, I had a chance to hear from Susannah about her ideas for communication. Her message was simple: people need to know what they need to do in order for messages to go out to the student body, they need to see a system happening and working and they also need to feel party to creating the protocols involved.

I think that last point is really important. No one I have spoken with so far responsible for programming has felt like they had insight into where in the process their communication was. They would email a request and then unpredictable things would happen. Furthermore, no programmer has expressed a feeling of understanding about the protocols. I would like to change this by chairing a committee where everyone involved in communication has a voice to help shape any and all these protocols. From the feedback so far, it appears that crafting communication protocol and getting buy-in is essential to the foundation of communications.

Thanks,

Brody

WIND Status

When I started as Delegate At-Large for Communications Amit charged me with applying for WIND access. In summary, WIND allows students to log into any website with their UNI. You do this all the time when using library web resources or to check courseworks etc. WIND was also what was used to authenticate students for the recent elections.

The reason WIND is important is because it can be used to limit access to a web resource. This could be useful for privacy of a forum or because CUIT requires a certain guarantee of exclusivity before they'll assist the GSSC with certain web development tasks.

I have completed and submitted the WIND Request document to Dean Stellini. For reference I you can see a copy of the document here.

Thanks,

Brody

Comm ideas from Niko

Over a late lunch I discussed with Niko his thoughts about how Communication can improve.

His top three ideas:

1. People hate the huge Weekly GSSC email
• It's too long, the second people see the scroll bar is tiny they check out
2. GSSC -> GS re-brand
• The average student has no idea what GSSC stands for (as an acronym) or means
• People who don't know trash GSSC emails
  
3. There is no way to connect right now to the GSSC
• Who can answer your question right now?
• How can we involve those who wish to volunteer their time more effectively?

Niko also has some interesting work items in mind:

• Communications Committee
• Outreach to the JTS community
• Outreach to the students starting in Fall and Winter

Thanks,

Brody

Comm ideas from Angelines and Gabrielle

This morning I met with Gabrielle Breen and Angelines Alba Mata to discuss both ways to improve communication within the GSSC.

The specific feedback they gave me centers around some key ideas:

• Published Communication Protocols
• There need to be clear, public guidelines about what is required to submit something to become part of the Weekly GSSC email or the public calendar. This protocol should include dates, times, formats and be followed by everyone involved in the process.
  
• The work required by programmers to coordinate publicity and budget and permission for the most trivial event is super complicated, slow and inefficient. This too should be defined in a protocol.
  
• Protocols should be put online
• Gabrielle and Angelines were very interested in an idea where they could just go to a web form which after being filled out would send them a reciept and would guarantee inclusion in the Weekly GSSC email or public calendar assuming they were on time etc.
  
• Eliminate personal blame
• Whatever protocols are used and whether or not they are in email, in person or online, there should be an effort to remove the "personal" part of the equation so that feelings aren't hurt and acrimony doesn't develop.
  
• Accountability
• Communications must work to establish credibility. If ideas are discussed they need to be implemented so that trust is built between Communications and the rest of the council.
  
• Everyone should know what Communications is working on at all times so that it is clear where effort is being spent.
  

Thanks,

Brody

Welcome to Communications News

As of Monday I was elected to the General Studies Student Council as the Vice President of Communications. As part of that I want to immediately start off by creating a clear and open record of what I am up to.

To start, you'll find this blog will be full of information I've gathered at meetings I am having with anyone and everyone who has something to share on how they envision communication in the future. I see my role as enabling effective communication and need as much input as possible so that I can start creating a strategy. I look forward to your feedback.

Thanks,

Brody Berg