Good job guys

Last night at their weekly meeting, Maren Killackey was impressed by CCSC.

For once, there is no snark. No cheap shots, no embarrassing quotes, or slight misinformation because, let’s face it, no one cares. Before descending into a sappy metaphor about some particularly efficient student government meeting (is there anything more sad?), I’ll leave it at “yesterday’s meeting was everything a CCSC meeting should be. Period.”

EcoReps stopped by to present on its bike share pilot program, which they’ve been working on for the past few years. After issuing a student interest survey last semester, they realized there’s huge demand among students for such a program. Although they launched a very small scale pilot last spring, the project was just marginally successful, especially since there were only 8 “janky” bikes… and it rained. This year they’re partnering with various bike share contractors around the city to provide a selected number of students 16 or so bikes to use at their leisure (more or less) FOR FREE during the last month of school. When asked about their target demographic, EcoReps answered that in the forseeable future, the bike share would cater to CC and SEAS students (no other schools yet) who want to have a bike in the city but have reservations about something that would take up an all-too dear 12 sq. ft. of space or just don’t want to spend the money to buy one. “Ideally, this would be a school wide initiative,” said Irene Jacqz, SEAS ‘13, who’s part of the EcoReps bike share team, “where grad students and faculty would be able to use it.” But this is a few more years down the road. Though funding is mostly covered now, they hope that as the program expands, CCSC might consider a co-sponsorship.

Next, Justin Hines, CC’13, representing the Columbia Application Development Initiative (ADI) and CCSC VP Campus Life Yanyi Luo presented on HackColumbia, a 24 hour hackathon taking place this Friday to Saturday (March 1-2) in the John Jay Lounge. Da fuq’s a hackathon, you ask? “Most people think it’s penetration testing,” admitted Hines, “but it’s really a just simple solution to a problem.” Once everyone was finished fighting – and losing to – their inner fourth grader (“HE SAID ‘PENETRATION’!”), Luo proceeded to explain how the hackathon would be a “win win win win” for the Columbia community:

1. It helps CCSC improve student life
2. Administrators get student input on new ideas
3. ADI gets access to Columbia data (get ready for a bombass courses.adicu.com)
4. Everyone gets useful apps.

And there’ll be free food. Oh, and prizes. Not shitty prizes either like 15% off your next order on Seamless or a Zune, but legit prizes including a GOOGLE CHROMEBOOK and MICROSOFT SURFACE. Yeah, that’s right, now you’re listening. Doors open at 7pm for registration on March 1, followed by dinner and a PitchFest at 8:00, after which attendees will break into teams and start work. If you’re not the hacking kind, you can also just come in, demand something, score food and peace. No not showering involved. For more information go to hackcolumbia.org. And click the “Harlem Shake” button.

Finally, the best for last: the launch of WTF Columbia. True, when VP Communications Jared Odessky announced the project last November, Bwog was skeptical, predicting it would degenerate into a place where students would bitch about dumb crap no one cares about, grumble, grumble, insert curmudgeonly Ron Swanson quote here. But it actually could be the most useful, practical thing CCSC has done in recent memory. WTF Columbia is basically a crowdsourcing website for the school, where students can login (with their unis) and share  ideas about What To Fix at Columbia (see what they did there?). Current ideas include creating a central student portal “with external links and important updates” to being able to view your print quota balance in SSOL. Everyone in the room agreed the site was, in no uncertain terms, genius, but one question loomed large: “What’s to keep ‘dicks dicks dicks dicks’ from being an idea?”, which is Mandelbaumian for, “Who’s moderating this?” For one, Odessky responded, your idea is tied to your uni. One of the cool aspects of WTFColumbia is that if someone has an idea you’re into, you can view their uni and send them an email about collaborating.This might have the potential drawback of people being shy about posting sensitive fixes, like a glitch in Health Services, but will hopefully weed out the dicks. There’s also a curse word monitor… but not like Bwog would know or anything…

Updates:

• The Bagel-palooza initiated last semester is starting up again. This Tuesday from 9am-12pm, CCSC members will be handing out free bagels in EC.
• Wonder Rep Steven Castellano is wrapping up work on first-year pass/fail. He’ll talk to Core professors about whether Core classes should be included in the policy as well as solicit feedback from students about whether they think the policy could serve its goal as a stress reducer. He’ll also start looking into a scheduled midterm period.
• Finally, CCSC’s Pre-Professional rep resigned this week after qualifying for impeachment. CCSC President Karishma Habbu acknowledged that this was a hard discussion, but it’s part of the job. “Being a part of CCSC for namesake is not acceptable and won’t be tolerated. Not by me and, hopefully, not by future councils.” Faith restored.

CCSC’s grade for the week via Shutterstock