TAMS Alumni Association (tamsalumni.org)
(This is cross-posted to planning (at) tamsalumni.org, and community.livejournal.com/tams_alumni.)
It seems the venerable founder of the TAMS Alumni Association, Suzanne Smith Steffens of '94, is stepping down, and TAA's future is up in the air.
I'd guess that a good way to run an alumni association, since everyone's spread out across very long distances, is to build a good website and let people (including the TAMS admin) use it to communicate and organize events and get-togethers in a very ad-hoc way. Is that anything like what everyone else had in mind?
From what I can see, tamsalumni.org seems to be like many association websites, longing for a comprehensive user directory with privacy settings, an easy calendar that handles times and places clearly, a photo gallery for pics taken at the events noted on the calendar, full-featured mailing lists, and busy phpBB or similar forums with rss support. But like most of the others, it seems to suffer from the fact that painfully few people have the skillz and time to build and maintain such a "groupware" beast. Maybe I'm wrong here and TAA admins are actually awash in time and expertise, but Robert Rohde's recent news postings sound a bit frustrated, tamsalumni.org seems to be fairly low-traffic, and the archives of all the mailing lists are giving a "No List Defined" error.
I notice the site already has mailing lists for 06 and 07; if it had phpBB or similar, current TAMSters might even use it, greatly driving up the traffic, probably hacking in new features, and making it a cooler, more interesting site for alums as well. Do current TAMSters already have some sort of online hangout not provided by the TAMS admin, with forums? If so, maybe instead of inviting them to us, we should go to them.
My knee-jerk suggestion is to centralize: it would make sense for many random, unrelated, small groups to share the same online system. (By "small", I'm thinking 10-1,000 or even 10,000 people.) Each group could spawn off a clone site that's easy to use and does these things, just as all typepad bloggers start from the same template, sharing code and a server. This could be done with one open source software package on many cheap paid hosts like pair or godaddy, although that would require someone (not me!) to write one.
Or perhaps it could be done on myspace, with horrible ads everywhere. Or it could be done on livejournal, which is wonderfully clean, easy, and mostly ad-free. Livejournal wouldn't stand up to a large number of rapidly-updated topics, since it has weak features for notifying users of which threads have had new posts, weak searchability, no categorization of threads, and no email lists or calendars. But so far the entire set of all TAMS grads, ever, hasn't overloaded the tams_alumni LJ group, and in fact it's pretty low-traffic.
I'm hoping everyone else has better ideas as well? :)
It seems the venerable founder of the TAMS Alumni Association, Suzanne Smith Steffens of '94, is stepping down, and TAA's future is up in the air.
I'd guess that a good way to run an alumni association, since everyone's spread out across very long distances, is to build a good website and let people (including the TAMS admin) use it to communicate and organize events and get-togethers in a very ad-hoc way. Is that anything like what everyone else had in mind?
From what I can see, tamsalumni.org seems to be like many association websites, longing for a comprehensive user directory with privacy settings, an easy calendar that handles times and places clearly, a photo gallery for pics taken at the events noted on the calendar, full-featured mailing lists, and busy phpBB or similar forums with rss support. But like most of the others, it seems to suffer from the fact that painfully few people have the skillz and time to build and maintain such a "groupware" beast. Maybe I'm wrong here and TAA admins are actually awash in time and expertise, but Robert Rohde's recent news postings sound a bit frustrated, tamsalumni.org seems to be fairly low-traffic, and the archives of all the mailing lists are giving a "No List Defined" error.
I notice the site already has mailing lists for 06 and 07; if it had phpBB or similar, current TAMSters might even use it, greatly driving up the traffic, probably hacking in new features, and making it a cooler, more interesting site for alums as well. Do current TAMSters already have some sort of online hangout not provided by the TAMS admin, with forums? If so, maybe instead of inviting them to us, we should go to them.
My knee-jerk suggestion is to centralize: it would make sense for many random, unrelated, small groups to share the same online system. (By "small", I'm thinking 10-1,000 or even 10,000 people.) Each group could spawn off a clone site that's easy to use and does these things, just as all typepad bloggers start from the same template, sharing code and a server. This could be done with one open source software package on many cheap paid hosts like pair or godaddy, although that would require someone (not me!) to write one.
Or perhaps it could be done on myspace, with horrible ads everywhere. Or it could be done on livejournal, which is wonderfully clean, easy, and mostly ad-free. Livejournal wouldn't stand up to a large number of rapidly-updated topics, since it has weak features for notifying users of which threads have had new posts, weak searchability, no categorization of threads, and no email lists or calendars. But so far the entire set of all TAMS grads, ever, hasn't overloaded the tams_alumni LJ group, and in fact it's pretty low-traffic.
I'm hoping everyone else has better ideas as well? :)