What's the 411'

A friend of mine asked me recently what I most dislike about Georgetown. I replied that I think Georgetown does a poor job at disseminating information.

I’m referring to the way information moves through networks. What sort of information? The calendar of upcoming student club events, of course, but also job opportunities, parties, road closures and so forth. Though our community does a good job of formally disseminating information, less official on-campus communication — the stuff of Red Square conversations, not Intercultural Center monologues — isn’t up to scratch.

The spread of informal information is incredibly important. Just ask anyone in the McDonough School of Business: “networking” is a great example of informal information dissemination. Information can come from random places, after all. You can read it in a newspaper, see it in an e-mail or pick it up from Twitter. Once the information has entered a social network, it has to find its way to the people who value it. The quicker the information disseminates across a social network, the more valuable it is and the greater synergy one gets from the network.

Say the International Relations Club is having a speaker event on violence against Christians in India. The IRC wants to attract as many people to the speaker event as possible, but the only people who will come are people who find the topic interesting. So the dilemma facing the IRC is: How do we get the information to the people who care?

The IRC doesn’t have a list of everyone who appreciates Indian politics and is free on Tuesday afternoons. So they release the information into the Georgetown network hoping the right people get it; they’re effectively shooting at a target they can’t see. You, the Indian political specialist, hear about it the next day and say to yourself, “I wish I’d heard about this earlier.”

This information, however informal, was valuable but is rendered worthless because it got stuck in the network and didn’t make it to you. The same thing happens with party plans (“Dude, why didn’t you come to the party last night? It was amazing!”), job offers, internships or cute classmates who recently became single.

Georgetown does not disseminate information well. The university relies on mass e-mails addressed to the entire campus, and has also offered Red Square for tabling. Student clubs depend on listservs, flyering and Facebook. None of these methods are particularly effective.

Flyering is inefficient — I point to the sheer number of flyers people feel they have to put up to recruit people as evidence of their inefficiency. I personally have started to mentally block out the signs I see because I’ve become so jaded.

Listservs, by far the most popular method of communication, are borderline useless. Everyone in the IRC is on a listserv, but only a handful of people are allowed to send e-mails out on it. Where is the synergy in that? It’s a monologue, not a dialogue. The network becomes reliant on only a handful of people.

Sure, I can e-mail the chair of the IRC and ask him to include things in the listserv emails, but that is not an effective way of disseminating information. I want to e-mail everyone in the club directly, establishing relationships with the other members. Think of it this way: If you want to tell John something, do you call John and tell him or do you call Ann and ask her to include it in her next conversation with John?

The ideal social network is one in which people directly engage with others. Listservs do not allow for that — it’s one person engaging with 100. What we need on campus is a culture of sharing, networking efficiency and synergy. In an effort to achieve that, I suggest the following:

Allow any student to create listservs. Imagine if every group you associated with had a listserv. You could easily e-mail everyone and everyone could easily e-mail you. If floors had active listservs, residences could discuss happenings on the floor.

Create a calendar using the Google Calendar application with every single student group activity listed on it. It would serve as a database of events that you could log on to in order to see everything that’s happening on any given night. A boring Tuesday afternoon could quickly turn into intriguing dialogue about domestic violence in India.

Try out a “What’s going on at Georgetown today” display, akin to the above, which would include information about on-campus activities on a daily basis. Use televisions to display it and place them in locations with high foot traffic like Red Square, the Intercultural Center, Lauinger Library and Vital Vittles.

Bring back the Village A rooftops. I think the decline of rooftop parties is one of the saddest things to happen in our community. Half the people I met during my first two years at Georgetown I first encountered there. That venue single-handedly expanded my social network at Georgetown more than any other place.

These are all services that are offered in some form to students. The benefits to enacting these ideas are the lower costs of disseminating information and the opportunity to create a strong new information network on campus.

Eamon Nolan is a senior in the School of Foreign Service. He can be reached at nolan@thehoya.com. Memoirs of a Traveler appears every other Monday on www.thehoya.com.

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