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