The MSJHS.net Manifesto

Administrative overhead of maintaining websites for the many clubs around school is overwhelming, and the system of individual domains and websites for each club is inefficient, unwieldy, and expensive.

There are many clubs at Mission (my high school) and many, many websites. From club websites to parent groups to student forums, the amount of content online is greater than ever before. Yet it’s nearly impossible to find any useful content online without previously knowing about an organization you are searching for. This problem affects not only students, but also parents, teachers, and community members.

The Internet has always been based upon a community of scattered individuals, but the size and characteristics of students and community members in high schools mean that decentralization causes problems for website readers and managers. In a microcosm with less than 2,500 students and a similar number of involved community members, it is difficult if not impossible for most organizations to maintain separate websites. Indeed, between the smallest student groups and the largest organizations, there are dozens of clubs that set up their own websites every year – but only a handful that have lasted longer than a year.

The problem is that sites are fragmented – with each club having an audience on the order of ten or a hundred people, taking the effort to write articles and post photos is hardly worth it. Even the websites of the most technically inclined organizations, like the web design, programming, and robotics clubs, have been little used and rarely accessed. After setting up sites, webmasters and officers often discover that they can’t build up readership without content, but can’t create content for a nonexistent audience.

When most clubs consist of tens of members (with even fewer active), there is no reason for most clubs to have their own websites and supporting servers and software. Each individual website’s domain name has a registration fee of about $10 that must be paid annually by the club. In addition, costs for web hosting, graphic design, and other operational expenses add to overhead. When the costs of hosting multiple websites are added, the financial cost alone can be significant. And that doesn’t even factor in the time spent by webmasters and officers implementing the sites, and the costs of leaving them inactive.

An alternative system of website organization would be a central website, hosting content for students, teachers, clubs, and other organizations. By supplanting the system of individual club websites currently in place, it would benefit both readers and club representatives by providing a center of communication, and a single control panel. By concentrating resources on a single website, it would improve functionality, creating the possibility of integrating with other web services like mailing lists, social networks, and forums. Finally, the website would become a way to keep students informed about activities around school. As a web service, this website would be easier to update and broader in scope than any physical resource. It would bring together different groups and different people, exposing students to new ideas and opportunities, and help both students and their organizations flourish.

In rough business terms, that’s the market. Now, what about the product and team?

The Product

Content is key with any website, and its biggest challenge. An endeavor like this requires us to bootstrap the site with content would be to use existing content sources like mailing lists and social networks, syndicating content from email or RSS. Standardization of content formats would be a challenge easily addressed by a combination of filters and working with organizations, given that organizations would benefit from additional publicity on our site in most cases.

The underlying system can be simple. In fact, it is possible to construct a prototype system system using Blogger content syndication and Blogspot hosting, providing a simple interface that users may already be familiar with. And, while Blogger may be basic on the surface, it includes a label-based filtering system, RSS syndication, and HTML widgets. If the president of Georgia can use a Blogspot blog to inform his nation about government affairs, then we can use it too.

In the interest of expandability, however, it is a better idea to use a more advanced and extensible platform. One such platform is Joomla, the most popular content management system in the school. Another more full-featured platform is Drupal, which has a greater degree of extendibility and flexibility. We have chosen Drupal for the MSJHS.NET project, because its classification system is less restrictive than its main competitor in the open-source Content Management area – Joomla and we find it easier to find and implement extensions.

Some of the tweaks we have thought of include custom views (feeds and news summaries from customizable sources), widgets for competition results (sports, academics, etc.), and material from student publications. It wouldn’t hurt to compile meeting minutes from Student Council and forms from the administration either. Featured student work from sources like portfolios (e.g. DeviantArt, photographers’ websites) would add some color to the site too.

The Team

The number of capable webmasters and historians at Mission (my high school) is already thin, because we don’t teach much in the way of technology classes. In addition, students – and especially content-writers – inevitably divide their time and effort among many clubs. The people who are dedicated and responsible enough to operate websites often have a disproportionate amount of other work, meaning that they have even less time and energy to devote to website management.

Often, this means that historians and webmasters neglect their duties, or that officers don’t consistently organize activities over the year. But such problems are more a reflection of problems with clubs than with our website, and as long as our site can become the best content source, it doesn’t matter if it will always be active for all clubs or not.

Returning to the subject, this is a project that could benefit from a talented, diverse team. Many fields tie into the project, including web design, art, public relations, writing, and project management. A strong team will not only provide expertise and make our site look its best, but it will also establish processes that will allow our site to adapt and expand over time.

Charting a Course

Bringing the website to launch will mean implementing software, reaching out to clubs, and assembling a team of maintainers. With the scale of our project and the sheer number of clubs (over sixty) at our school, initial content should be easy to procure from mailing lists.

After launch, though, maintaining a significant number of active clubs will be our greatest challenge – as with any website of our kind. Parent groups produce some of the most consistently reliable content on what’s going on at school, and student government holds jurisdiction over all clubs at school. There are opportunities for relationships here that are beneficial for everyone involved.

The community is also be a useful resource, and one that we should involve if we aspire to truly be a community website. Besides, local experts like Stanford students and usability specialists – whom we are fortunate enough to have near our school – have invaluable wisdom on startups and business development that we can use.

In the end, our project will serve club leaders by providing them with readership and a central control panel, and benefits students by syndicating content that provides a preview of what participation in a club would be like. As a portal for club content, its goal will be to become a hub of student communication and spark a new kind of online community – one that transcends physical barriers and connects people and organizations of all kinds.