The Story
At Tufts University, great value is placed on undergraduate students' involvement in the campus community as well as their engagement with the world around them. Students are selected for admission to Tufts in part based on their proclivity toward such involvement. It is understandable, therefore, that Tufts students are inclined to seek out opportunities to participate in campus life.
Some years ago, seeking out such opportunities required a burdensome and substantial amount of effort, as there was no simple way to discover the vast array of activities on campus at any given time. Stepping in to solve this problem in 2000 was a coalition of enterprising and visionary Tufts students who sought to banish this problem from campus. Founding the website TuftsLife.com and an eponymous student organization to operate it, they were entirely successful.
The instantly ubiquitous TuftsLife has, for the past decade, served as an information and events portal catering to Tufts undergraduates on the Medford/Somerville campus. It provides students with a wealth of information about goings-on — both on campus and off — as well as a forum for students to post announcements for all to read.
As useful as TuftsLife was and is, and as times change, new technologies develop and cultures and habits evolve around them. One example of this over the past 10 years is the rise in prevalence of cell phones and text messaging — particularly among the current generation of students — as a primary means to stay in touch with the world around them. This holds especially true especially when students can't be in front of a computer. Though most online services have evolved with the emergence of text messaging (indeed, some services have been built around it), this represents a new and unexplored frontier for TuftsLife.
The Answer
Enter Referendum 1. In the context of TuftsLife's much larger goal of facilitating student interaction and participation in the Tufts campus community through technology, this project, if funded, would fill a notable limitation in the accessibility of the popular service. Namely, that its utility is stymied when students pack up and go to class, work, etc., leaving their computers behind.
Referendum 1 funds a one-year trial of a lease for TuftsLife to operate what's called an SMS short code. It's a five-digit phone number (TUFTS, or 88387) that you can send text messages to and (if wanted) immediately in return, receive any information about campus that you can find on TuftsLife and much, much more. Below, we'll delve into the features we plan to offer to the Tufts community (really, anyone, anywhere in the world) if we're so lucky to be able to launch.
Information Query System and Events
Forgot the location of tonight's Leonard Carmicheal Society (LCS) meeting? No problem. Just text "LCS meeting" to TUFTS. Need the phone number for the English department? Text "Eng." (TuftsLife will provide an easy online interface for departments and groups at Tufts to set up their own texting keywords.) Dewick-MacPhie Dining Hall's menu? "Dewickmenu." It's that simple. And that's just one group of features.
Alerts
In addition to getting immediate results when you need information fast, you can request alerts when certain real-world things happen. You'll be able, for instance, to sign up for school closing alerts. Finally, you'll be able to click "Remind me" next to a future event on TuftsLife to get a reminder text before an event you want to go to.
Distribution Lists
One last major feature that we plan to offer is an e-list type system that student organizations and departments can run. Tufts community members can sign up for lists, and (only if you affirmatively sign up for a given list) you can stay in the loop every time the person running the e-list blasts out a message.
The Referendum
This service, if it is funded and it catches on, would be groundbreaking. We haven't been able to find any universities that have anything like it. It would be a point of pride for Tufts, it would be discussed on tours and it would be the envy of other schools just like TuftsLife is.
This service is admittedly a bit costly (it's the exact same service operated by entities much larger than Tufts), and as a result the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate has preferred we present this funding request directly to the student body. Therefore, it appears as Referendum 1 on today's TCU General Election ballot.
While it's costly, it's worth noting that if this service became permanent, factoring it into TuftsLife's annual TCU budget, we would barely be the most expensive media group Tufts has. Considering our near-universal usership, this isn't outrageous. That belies the fact, however, that the referendum isn't for permanent funding, and with this referendum we are approaching funding in the most financially prudent manner possible.
Working with last year's TCU Treasurer, Kate de Klerk, and getting her endorsement of this plan as fiscally responsible, we have drafted this referendum, which funds just a one-year trial of this service, if/when, and only if/when, the TCU budget surplus exceeds $170,000. (The surplus is completely unallocated student activities funds that are just sitting in a bank account.)
At that point, TuftsLife would get the first $20,000 of that to run this trial. There are no guarantees of, or commitments to, future funding built into this referendum beyond the one year.
It would be up to the TCU Senate and the student body at the end of the trial to determine if it were "worth it" to fund the service further.
For the benefits it could bring all of us, and for the great legacy we could be bestowing upon the university by starting this service, I ask you to join me in trying out this service, and voting YES on Referendum 1 today.
The link to vote is on TuftsLife. (Where else?)
For more information about this service, its planned features at launch time, answers to common concerns and the full text of the referendum, see www.tuftslife.com/referendum.
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Michael Vastola is a senior majoring in computer engineering. Taylor Lentz is a sophomore majoring in computer science. Vastola was recently elected to the TCU Senate.
