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Sunday, May 01, 2005
Demanding More from the ASUC (and CalStuff)
The approaching end to the semester has reminded me of one of my annual gripes. The ASUC does a terrible job of providing some of the services that students want. For now, I will mention three specific things. First, students want to find out about classes and professors when they are doing telebears. Right now, there a number of websites (like ratemyprofessor) that do this, but for a situation like this, more is not better. In an ideal world, all the professor rating would be stored in one central location. Instead, you get questions about classes or teachers in the Berkeley LiveJournal community, and a ton of other places. This is terribly terribly inefficient. Similiarly, a couple weeks ago a passing remark about housing in Berkeley on CalStuff led to a discussion in the comment section about who were the landlords and apartments to avoid. Finally, students seeking rides often turn to Craigslist, where they meet up with sketchy old people, instead of fellow students, to get rides from. These three examples show that there is a demand for these things. Students want to be able to share information and communicate with each other about school related things. And this dream is extremely close to a reality. There is actually a website, one.berkeley.edu, that contains all these things and more. There is a ridefinder, a classified section, a lost and found, a professor rating section, and much much more. But I'm not aware of a single candidate for the ASUC that made expanding awareness of that site and encouraging participation by students a priority. For any readers who want the ASUC to provide them with some useful services, if you know the next AAVP, please tell him or her to devote serious time and energy into promoting the site. And next year, I would encourage everyone to use it themselves. But the real reason I brought up the subject, is because CalStuff will be upgrading itself over the summer. We will most likely be switching platforms to something more exciting, and adding new features, like expandable posts. That means long posts will now only show the first couple of paragraphs, and a link will allow you to reveal the rest of the text. And since readership is likely to taper down as we get into finals season, I wanted to inquire now about any other features you guys would want us to consider adding as well. The CalPatriotBlog keeps a running sidebar doodad with the ten most recent comments, which is also something we would look to add. Any suggestions about other features would be appreciated, and we'll see which of them are feasible.Email This Post! |
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