Posted on | by Sam Swift

I know I don’t want to admit it, but the reality is that the end of summer is in sight, and the Buggy Alumni Association wants to be ready for another big year (our 4th!).  After the buzz from raceday died down, we all took a healthy break from buggy madness, but a few things have been coming together on those rainy days.  The theme of these projects is that we are hoping to get more of our members actively involved this year making the BAA and cmubuggy.org better and better.

Buggy Orientation Event

For the second year, current students will be holding a multi-org, non-partisan introduction to buggy for the incoming class near the end of orientation.  This is exactly the kind of thing that we want to be happening on campus, so we want to support it any way we can.  Right now the agenda includes buggies on display, an intro talk explaining the sport and basic terms, and an outdoors demo session.  Want to help pull the next generation into buggy?  Help is needed advertising the event, setting things up, and talking with interested freshmen, etc.  Current students are especially important to have involved. Contact Ben Matzke (ben.matzke@gmail.com) if you want to help out.  Details:

Saturday, August 27th
3:30 – 4:30 @ UC Connan : basic Q&A
5-6 @ CFA Parking lot / base of Hill 1: rolling buggy demos

BAA Project Zone


The committee here at headquarters has talked a lot about what we can accomplish for buggy and how best to harness everyone’s energy and resources to make it happen.  One concept is that we should be more direct and democratic about choosing projects and spending money on them.  We think it would also be more satisfying to our members if it was clear how their contributions translated directly into cool projects.

The vision was to have a section on the website where people could propose ideas, vote for the ones they like the most, and coordinate efforts to make it happen.  Instead of waiting until we could build a whole new part of the website, we’re going to experiment with using reddit which already does those things well.  If you’re not familiar with reddit, it’s a very popular social media website that also enables anyone to create sub-communities.  We’ve done that, and you can now visit r.cmubuggy.org  (or reddit.com/r/cmubuggy) and participate.  You’ll have to login or register a reddit account, but that is easy to do.

Once you get there, submit ideas for projects you think the BAA should pursue, vote up or down on other ideas, and help us and each other work out the logistics for how we can move from ideas to action.

The open source cmubuggy.org

This website is awesome, but I’ll admit it has had its moments of weakness and still doesn’t have half of the super cool features we’ve talked about.  From now on, anyone is free to change that.  I’ve committed the code to github, and I welcome anyone with some php skills to have at it.  Don’t have web development skills?  github also gives us a simple bug tracker that will hopefully streamline the process of fixing what is broken.  Need some clarification as you dig in?  Just let me know, I’m happy to enable.

the Reference section

Our new reference section got off to a great start in April and May with 10 or more active contributors making a couple of hundred edits to get the ball rolling.  That said, there is so much more to be done.  When 1,600 freshman hit campus in 3 weeks and get curious about buggy, we want our site and the reference section in particular to be able to answer any question they have.  Right now, there are some really key pages that need a lot of help or haven’t even been started.  For example:

Get involved.

Once buggy is back on everyone’s mind in a month or so, we’re going to have elections for some of the BAA board positions as well as naming any new positions that we deem necessary and can find a volunteer for.  Want to be a forum moderator, a reference section curator, or a champion a specific project?  We want you to step up.  In our first 3 years, we’ve had fewer than 10 people in leadership roles and they’ve come from only about 3 or 4 of the buggy organizations.  Greeks are particularly under-represented.  We want this to change.  More people with more perspectives on how awesome buggy is, and how it could be even better, starting with you.

 

2 thoughts on “A new year, new ideas; your help wanted”

  • Jerry says:

    Agreed, I’ll definitely try to contribute to those articles in my spare time (when I’m not designing buggies *cough*) The fact that the link coloration is backwards (blue articles don’t exist, red ones do) from Wikipedia will take a little getting used to, but it matches the theme of the site.

    Also, now I had to become a redditor. Thanks, Sam.

Comments are closed.