IH02-Carnive

From IEOR 170 Spring 2007

[edit] Project Proposal

The target user group in mind is the undergraduate student population. More specifically, all students that are both looking for and trying to publicize events.

The proposed solution is to have a central website that catalogues all student-run events, and allows for bored/interested students to search, organize, and browse through all event listing in order to find events of interest to attend.

There is currently no central website that catalogues all the events on campus. The advantages of such a website are obvious; a centralized, searchable database of all campus events would make it far easier to find relevant events, and prevent student groups from holding duplicate events. (I remember one night where there were 3 date auctions at the same time, all in the ground floor of Evans)

Many attempts at creating such a site have already occured, and all failed to achieve the critical mass required to make the site useful. Examples of such attempts are live.berkeley.edu, one.berkeley.edu, and ucwiki.com. Current calendars with more limited scope include the official Berkeley events calendar and the Berkeley Zellerbach Performaing Arts calendar.

A successful website must have several features/benefits in order to be accepted by the mainstream. First and foremost, it must be intuitive to use, and quick to get results. It must not only contain the breadth of events, but also organize them in a convenient fashion, with the event calendar easily able to be recalled. Finally, it must be easy not just for users seeking information, but also for event organizers to input events.

To summarize:

• Large, descriptive selection of events
• Easy to add events
• Easy to find, browse, search events
• Have an event recall (save function)

A well-designed central events website would not only allow students to better keep track of events, but also encourage students to attend events that they would otherwise wouldn't have known about.