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