``What should I do tonight?''
This fundamental question is one that faces just about everyone from
time to time. For an MIT student, though, the question becomes,
``what can I do?'' Though MIT has many activities to offer its
students, lack of publicity often hinders the success of these
activities. Although many activities are publicized by a variety of
distributed methods, such as concentrated e-mail mailing lists, booths
set up in campus lobbies to advertise specific events, and, most
prominently, bulletin boards scattered about campus, students have no
single definitive source of activity information.
The event database
We propose creating such a source of information for MIT's student
body. The MIT administration, various student groups around campus,
and the students themselves would enter dates, times, locations, and
descriptions of events into an events database, which the students
could then access by a variety of methods. The World Wide Web, a
dedicated phone number, and touch-screen kiosks located around the MIT
campus would all provide access to the database.
Portable, personalized information
The most important method of accessing the event database would be via
a two-way alphanumeric pager. Students could establish a personal
profile, showing their interest in particular categories of events,
such as movies or community-service projects. Using pagers as a
principal means of access provides several advantages to students.
Most notably, since the pager is portable, students will always be
able to access the database from wherever they are. Even if they are
off campus, away from a telephone or a computer, an MIT student will
always be able to find out what is happening on campus.
We are asking Motorola to donate approximately 4,000 two-way
alphanumeric pagers for this project. This should be sufficient to
give a pager to each MIT undergraduate student. Student groups will
only contribute information to the event database if they believe it
will reach a large segment of the MIT community. If every student has
a pager, student groups will know that the information they contribute
can be seen by everyone, not just a small segment of the student body.
Benefits of the project
Our system will benefit the entire MIT community. Students will be
able to learn about activities on and off campus simply by looking at
the information available through their pagers. The student gets to
decide what is important, and chooses which announcements to read and
which to simply discard. Student groups can broadcast their
announcements to all of the MIT undergraduate population, not simply
those who stop to look at their bulletin board. This project will
create a necessary bridge between students and student groups, and
will allow students to do what they want to do during their free time.
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