Slashdot Mirror
Re-purposing a Student Tech Service Group?
discards writes "I help run a student group at a Canadian University. For almost 15 years we've provided students with services such as web space, email, wireless internet on campus, cvs/svn, database access, mailing lists, etc., all using Linux and FOSS. In recent years, however, we have faced becoming obsolete. The university now provides wireless access, people get their email from other places such as Google, which also provides free svn access, web space, and so forth. Since we have a large amount of decent, usable hardware, as well as space, funding and a very fast internet connection, we are looking to possibly reform instead of just withering away and dying. We would like to ask Slashdot for ideas as to what we could do; preferably something that cultivates student research or provides an otherwise useful service to students, though all ideas are welcome."
You could provide hosting for recent graduates that want to make their own start-up. This seems to be one of the main expenses for such graduates besides costs of living.
At some point every person needs tech support. They don't know how to do something, their computer died, they lost data, are infected by a virus or some basic functionality has been lost.
Tech support would be number one on my list of helpful services.
The other thing that would be helpful is basic computer education. Yes, I know that most people in college already know how to work on the computers, however some, possibly older students, might be embarrassed to admit they don't know everything they feel that they should know. Confidential, one on one tutoring can eliminate the fear of admitting they aren't fully up to speed.
"Giving money and power to governments is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." - P.J. O'Rourke
Forget college students. Do something for inner-city youth. Gather old computer parts from your school or lbusiness, put them together, install linux and give them to schools with limited computing resources. Involve the students in this process as well. Teach them how to install linux. Then teach them how to administer their own system.
I think we could work out a very profitable deal on your part.
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Stephen Pilgrim
Assistant Manager
RIAA campus solution recruitment
Why not take on a bigger challenge, and focus on teaching? Run small mini-classes on various topics, teach programming at all kinds of different levels, how to solve engineering problems numerically, etc. Since it is an engineering/design school, you can provide some kind of (real-life or online) forum helping people use technology to solve problems. I suppose this will somewhat depend on how your college's schedule works, but you will find that students will make time for you if you're providing a useful service. You've got the hardware -- now you just need to find a niche to add the value.
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Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
I have just joined a similar group, the Harvard Computing Society (http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/). We try to provide more up to date web services to student organizations. We provide web hosting for student groups that is capable of running all the latest web goodies like Drupal, Mediawiki, sql, and the like. We also maintain mailing lists for student organizations, and advocate for better tech practices at Harvard. There are also lots of other cool projects in the pipeline that may or may not go anywhere but are fun to work on: IPtv, content aggregation from student org websites, internet phone, and other off the wall ideas. I am still new to the organization, but everything seems to work very well.
Taking this successful example, I would suggest taking advantage of the fact that you can be less bureaucratic than the school's general IT staff to provide more modern web tools to student organizations.
How about offering a back-up service for students work? Sure, you currently offer services that could be used as such but your average student has no idea how to do it. Offer a nice simple web interface that allows them to upload files that they really wouldn't want to lose.
As other posters have pointed out, you could also move into entertainment services and help for recent graduates.
I wouldn't ditch things like the svn/cvs, webspace and database access though. My CS department used to run their own services and having them on campus was great since I could go ask our helpdesk people if something went wrong or I needed extra space etc.
Silly rabbit
A custom MMORG?
Maybe the game could focus on a school campus, and everyone goes to class via avatar.
The violent clash of ideas could get down to virtual fisticuffs.
Professors could do grevious bodily harm to annoying students.
Endless possibilities.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Offer what Google doesn't; a protected data repository for the students IP. Make a local hosting source for all of the CS (and other) departments online projects, and educate them about why where you keep stuff on the 'net is as important as any other aspect. I know that all my g-mail is searchable, readable, and essentially the property of Google (if you can believe their TOS). Teach the students about Corporate and Private IP, how to protect it when it needs protecting, when and when not to hand over your rights...start discussions about why your data center is or is not needed.
The key is that your users need to have a motivation beyond saving money. If someone is with you to simply save money they will be easily lured away by a cheaper competitor. You need to get people involved because they are passionate about what you do.
Maybe start up a content production cooperative (movies, music, stories, ...) with a policy of releasing everything under a Free license? Your student group can provide all the production facilities and branch out into buying microphones, cameras and so on. Make it even more interesting by having an open "bazaar style" production process too, instead of just presenting finished projects.
Get a bunch of people together who are passionate about freedom for arts and technology. These people will stick with you for the long term.
There is plenty of infrastructure now for the Libre movement (svn servers, web, email providers, source forge...). Don't compete with that which is is well established. What is needed now is plenty of fantastic content under Free licenses, with which we can run the mafiaa out of town.
Sounds like you're a solution in need of a problem. Try asking the students what you can do for them. I'd probably start with the postgrads since they tend to actually need things, and know they need it.
I know at my uni people found it hassle when needing to crunch data - server slots were a scarce resource and there was a lot of people scheduling things so they could crunch on their workstation over the weekend (often dropping in to see if it got stuck).
I'll bet there's a large number of other groups crying out for decent hardware, space, funding and maybe even the fast internet connection. If your group's services are no longer required it's time to hand the resources over.
Maybe change the focus to having your students do a little more research on what students and faculty are actually doing. As an example have the students look at various websites posted by students and faculty and see what can be changed to make the site more interactive or figure out where a database could be used to help gather and sort data. Students could also look around campus at the various publications and forms and change them into online forms or databases. And as always good fall backs are cleaning & restoring computers and performing upgrades. Hope it helps. Good luck.
Keep offering email services. GMail is not an acceptable alternative in many situations. In the Canadian University where I'm a faculty member some groups refuse to send mail to gmail addresses because Google scans all mail (this violates privacy contracts on some research material). This will affect final year undergrads and grad students mostly and already occurs. In addition things like the US "patriot" act mean that provincial privacy laws in many cases make Universities very uneasy to send any private information to gmail addresses due to the server location in the US - our University has not yet refused gmail addresses but they are working up to some sort of policy which will probably do so.
I'm currently a student (after being an admin for 10 years) working on a history degree. The one thing every class wants is lively out of class discussion but you never get it with the "blackboard" clones. Make available a PHPBB workalike to instructors with easy to remember URLs (eg, HIS3660.youdomain.com).
With that simple tool an instructor can post videos, syllabus, and class material that can be seen from any browser.
You could probably even offer this to student groups including the, gasp, non-school sponsored ones that don't get resources (like the history club I'm in).
Hire me...
Then my fortunes changed when I had the chance to buy a used Altos 8086 computer running Microsoft's version of AT&T Version 7 Unix called "Xenix" ( )
What was great about it, is that it had a program called "learn" ( ) which was a tutorial that taught both Unix and C.
It's a shame that "learn" is not included in modern Unix and Linux distros. That would be a valuable resource for students that would otherwise only be exposed to an OS (which will remain nameless here) that was designed for computer illiterates.
This is your chance to make sure the next generation can at least perceive the elegance and thought that went into making an OS and programming language that was designed by and for programmers, instead of by and for businessmen.
I'm currently the president of the Computer Science Club at another Canadian university. We, too, have a variety of machine architectures, and provide web/email accounts to students. We've stopped seeing as many signups for the web hosting and email side of things, and we've shifted our focus recently to a number of other things. For example, we're starting to run tutorials to introduce first year students to both the University's undergraduate computing environment as well as our own, and advertising some of our more powerful machines as a method for students who want to run processor/memory-intensive experiments to do so cheaply. One other thing we did was to make a deal with the web-design club at our school so that they now host all club sites which they design on our servers, since we have the ability to set up subdomains under our university's domain on their behalf. Lastly, one other thing which we're working on improving is setting up a proper library with copies of the various textbooks needed by students, as well as various other recommended reference books.
Crushing dreams at the speed of sarcasm
Start a business incubator. Help tech students learn the basics of accounting, business law, incorporation, etc. and hopefully have some good ideas come to fruition. Provide hosting and support for student businesses. Provide CRM instances for students to track their contacts.
They will pay it back big time if they make it big.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
While a clever way to comply with the law, this is wishful thinking. Most students will avoid the service because it doesn't have $RIAARTIST1 or $RIAAARTIST2.
To give some perspective: my college has a well-publicized campus radio station, but only a small percentage of students listen to it over ClearChannel stations.