University of Waterloo :: reddit student and alumni-run Reddit for University of Waterloo community. of Waterloo :: reddit do you find out whats going on at UWaterloo?, 29 Jan 2013 18:06:52 -0800<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>I see a problem at Waterloo that there are a lot of cool things going on that people don&#39;t know about. How true do you think this is? How are you currently finding out about what is going on?</p> <p>If enough people see this problem as a legitimate one, I&#39;m willing to try to make it better. Any suggestions on how to go about it?</p> <p>Thanks!</p> </div><!-- SC_ON --> submitted by <a href=""> ubermatt </a> <br/> <a href="">[link]</a> <a href="">[8 comments]</a> on Where do you find out whats going on at UWaterloo? you mean events happening at UW? I rely mainly on The Daily Bulletin, Facebook groups and Twitter. Occasionally, bulletin boards across campus. But yes, I do end up missing events here and there for sure. on Where do you find out whats going on at UWaterloo? GGG to link to all of the above or a super GGG that imports all those to one page and embed on the /uwaterloo homepage on Where do you find out whats going on at UWaterloo?'re going to work on an Events tab on so people can search event content separately from web pages, but this will only cover events that are posted on Drupal sites. Members from our team and others on campus are going to be working on a Student Portal which could aggregate this sort of thing. Student involvement is always great, so if you would like to work on this problem with a team of campus IT staff please contact me. on Where do you find out whats going on at UWaterloo? is a perrenial project to implement some sort of centralized events calendar, but it runs into the problem of trying to be everything for everyone. I guarantee that only a small fractions of events are of any interest to a given individual, and that signal-noise ratio means that people check it once and never return. That is of course assuming that you make the submission process easy enough that anyone can submit. If you don't then you don't get any events. Unfortunately, this system requires moderation to prevent spam, which results in one of two things: * If the site is administration run, this leads to censorship and slow approval response times. * If it's run by volunteers/students, it dies out when they go on coop/graduate. Furthermore, unless they dedicate time to advertise, they never get events. A unified calendar for events on campus is clearly a desired service. It's been a part of many Feds campaign platforms over the years ([this year is no exception -Page 40](, not to mention the numerous independent and administration attempts. Examples: * - Users could submit free food events to a google calendar. No advertising done, so few events were posted. It switched to a [Twitter Account]( Appears to now be a spambot. * []( - Admin controlled. Used to be in a nicer format. Great example of signal to noise. There are some obvious attempts at dividing the events by interest group, but longstanding things like &quot;Earth Sciences Museum Tours&quot; are not really events, but just saying &quot;Hey, we're still open!&quot; * [OMGUW Events]( - Good idea, I thought that their active community would enable it to flourish. Lack of effort means it's now a empty page with some spambots. * [The Daily Bulletin's When and Where]( - Perhaps the best events calendar on campus, despite the site's switch from interesting UW news to marketing propoganada. * And there have been so many more... All in all, this is something that students crave. However, there are significant technical, social, and political issues that have prevented any one of them from being successful. on Where do you find out whats going on at UWaterloo? for the incredibly detailed reply! I never knew about those. The calendar and daily bulletin seem to be very focused on university run events. There are a lot of cool club and society events that are not included on both of these. I agree that there is an issue with the signal-noise ratio. However this could potentially be solved by some better tagging and filter options. Right now all clubs and society events must fill out a Feds club event form. By adding a few more fields to that form regarding online promotion, we could potentially sync it with the and have a centralized database. From there, someone could filter out events of interest. Thoughts? on Where do you find out whats going on at UWaterloo?**Edit: Fixed some grammar and a broken link.** Who should build a unified events calendar for all events that occur on campus? **The Federation of Students:** As I mentioned, Feds has wanted to do this for years. The problem with Feds is that they don't have the technical skills and resources to develop such applications/websites. (They have a small tech division, but they are generally busy with keeping things running internally) Because of this, the [Student Developer Network]( was started. Their goal was to harness the power of student developers to improve Fed's technical offerings. Their first project was supposed to be a replacement/upgrade of [the FedBus website.]( It's over [2 years late]( But that's not to bash on the SDN. The problem is that developers tend to prefer to work on their own brainchild projects. The SDN realized this and did a marvellous job of transforming into what they are today: a place for student developers to meet and showcase their work. This is all to say that I don't think Feds has the resources to achieve this goal. If not Feds, who should work on this project? **The University Administration:** The administration is another obvious choice. The user [kolafson]( who I responded to, is a member of the University's IST department (whom I respect since he is honestly attempting to improve this school). This is to say that IST has been recently looking for 'student experience improvement' projects. One team has been working for the past 6 months on an Android app for UW students (but that's another story). The problem with the administration developing and maintaining a central events calendar is very simple: censorship. Whether you realize it or not, the University's image is their #1 asset, and UW has a fairly powerful marketing team to ensure that this image remains untarnished. In recent years, the image they have been promoting can be summed up as [&quot;Our [students] are totally focused [on academic success]&quot;]( Anything that threatens that image will be suppressed to the best of their abilities. This is why when I was looking into having University resources help support [The Warrior Wiki](, I was warned by members of IST with the phrase &quot;It won't be today, it won't be tomorrow, it won't even be next month; But by the end of the year the university's media department will be actively censoring the site&quot;. Maybe that was a bit too dark. Instead consider this: Imagine that the university administration had a wonderful, unified, central events calendar that had every event happening at the university. Anyone who wants to know what's happening on campus uses the site. Anyone could submit events or browse through the past events to gain inspiration for future events they might want to host. **Scenario 1:** Now imagine that some students decided that they [wanted to organize and host an 'Epic Sex Club Adventure']( Wanting publicity for the event, they submit it to the university's calendar. An event like this is likely to cause [some]( [ire]( in the community if the media got a hold of it, and directly contradicts the 'Our students are 100% academically focused.' line. I leave it as a thought exercise to you to decide whether this event would be posted to the calendar or not. However, I posit that it would not, or if it were, that it would be buried away under layers of filters (possibly with a modified title and description) and not given equal treatment as any other legitimate event. **Scenario 2:** The university has a falling out with the Federation of Students after news of a brawl at Bomber reaches headlines of the K-W Record. The university overreacts and [shuts down Bomber until they can address 'safety concerns']( Feds takes them to court claiming that they broke their contract to allow Bomber to operate. Do you think that after this sort of falling out, the administration will be as willing to post events run by Feds? I used Feds as an example since it **actually happened**, but the same goes for any group that draws particular ire from the administration. Speaking of which... **Scenario 3:** The University declares that it is not renewing the licence for Fed Hall. The students are not happy with this and plan a [protest to storm the Board of Governors meeting]( Do you think that the administration would make sure that such an event gets mentioned on the calendar that everyone is checking to “find out what’s going on at UWaterloo”? This is the problem with having the university host it. Events will not be treated equally. They will be censored or hidden. Further, this assumes that the university actually devotes resources into supporting such an endeavour. As anyone who has dealt with the administration can tell you, they are not quick to reply to emails (and often their devotion to their jobs ends at 4:30pm). Events submitted with short notice, events submitted after work hours, or events submitted on weekends, will just have to wait to be posted until someone gets around to it. So no, the university administration does not appear to be the best solution to this project. **Independent Student Group** This project could be taken up by an independent organization, one that doesn't care about politics or image, one that has a zest for improving things for students, and one with the technical know-how to handle it. The problem with independents is that they are almost exclusively students. Students are a problem for two reasons: * Time: UW is a tough school academically (When the university was designing its first engineering program, it looked to the hardest engineering school in Canada, UofT, and upped the work requirements of the students by 10%.). Students who have the technical know-how often feel that they don't have the time required to work on extra-curriculars. Student groups who are dedicated may be able to build the site, but it takes an extra degree of resilience to continue operating it when midterms/exams/assignments strike. * Graduation: Students are only here for a handful of years. Even if they are the most enthusiastic volunteers and care about operating such a website, they eventually graduate and stop caring. We see this with the [litter of websites]( that were created and have since been abandoned. We see this in the [thousands of clubs]( that have vanished into the lost pages of history. **Independent company** There are companies that specialize in running events websites. I'm going to rule them out for the following reason: * They need to make money to stay in business. Their revenue models are not necessarily in the students' best interests. In theory, there is nothing from stopping a benevolent corporation from running the calendar show (except lack of profits). But I wouldn't hold your breath. **Summary** There are many groups who could take the project of unified calendar, here is my breakdown: Admin: * Advantages: Here forever, large resources * Disadvantages: Censorship, Slow to react/respond Feds: * Advantages: Here forever, (Theoretically) Has the best interest of students at heart * Disadvantages: Not enough technical know-how, Some censorship for political and/or &quot;legal reasons&quot; Independent Corporation: * Advantages: Independent * Disadvantages: Needs money, Needs incentive to improve beyond basic needs Independent Student groups: * Advantages: Enthusiastic, Has the best interest of students at heart * Disadvantages: Limited resources **Closing Remarks** I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the best group (that I know of) for this is probably [OMGUW]( They have been operating successfully for over 3 years now, updates quite frequently at all times of the day, and has some (although limited) technical know-how. They have a dedicated group of volunteers and have survived the churn of generations of students. With a little bit of effort, I could see this becoming a real events hub for the students of the university. Please remember that although this post has become stupidly long, it doesn't cover everything about the topic. There are many reasons why such a calendar does not exist, and why the numerous attempts before it have all failed to grab the attention of the students. Any system will either have to have the buy-in of the various groups that will be submitting events, or will have to be designed to scrape events from the calendars that these groups create themselves. This means that until people can put aside their politic-ing, we are unlikely to see an events calendar on campus that contains all the awesome events that happen. That doesn't mean that we can't do a lot better than what we have today... on Where do you find out whats going on at UWaterloo? subreddit. on Where do you find out whats going on at UWaterloo?'ve found events through EventBrite before.