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."
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
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.
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.
I can't believe that students wouldn't rather have hosting locally rather then in some place in the USA.
Make it cheap, make it usable, make it useful.
Run tech courses, educating students about different technology.
Run LAN parties.
Do things that require face to face communication, and that people can't get some other place.
Do tech support and trouble shooting for people's websites (which they won't get else where).
Try and integrate into different departments, especially science related ones, and host data, run resource intensive programs etc.
Expand your eligibility criteria, open it up to arts students.
Also check out other student groups around the world, for example: http://www.tucs.org.au/
Most of all, enjoy.
I wank in the shower.
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