With over a year of experience crowdsourcing student ideas, including the now-implemented digitization of timesheets for on-campus employees, the renovation of Novack Cafe and the addition of cell phone charging stations to Baker-Berry Library, Improve Dartmouth recently made changes to its site and plans for program expansion and ways to increase online participation, co-founder Gillian O’Connell ’15 said.
O’Connell said that Improve Dartmouth grew out of the Dartmouth Roots, an undergraduate organization that focuses on idea implementation founded by Esteban Castaño ’14 and other members of the Class of 2014 during the summer of 2012. She is currently one of the organization’s managing directors.
Six moderators run Improve Dartmouth, an online forum for students to submit suggestions to enhance life on campus. Two Dartmouth Roots members, two representatives from Student Assembly and two members of the Palaeopitus senior society make up this moderating team, O’Connell said.
Improve Dartmouth has already successfully implemented 35 ideas, according to the Improve Dartmouth website.
Activity on the site peaked when the site first launched last January, as many students were excited to submit ideas that they had long thought of as practical means of bettering life on campus, O’Connell said.
While the site enjoyed lasting success throughout the rest of the year, O’Connell said that activity decreased over the summer term as less students were on campus and there were no active Improve Dartmouth moderators.
She added that it has been difficult to match last year’s participation, largely because the Class of 2018 was not on campus at the start of the endeavor so their participation has been less substantial. Students from the Class of 2018 only comprise six percent of their current 4,613 users, according to their Feb. 23 report. Students from the Classes of 2015, 2016 and 2017 comprise 17, 17 and 20 percent, respectively, with the remainder of users being alums, faculty and staff.
Despite this drop in online traffic, O’Connell said she believes that new publicity initiatives will cultivate a stronger interest from the freshmen class.
“The decline in activity that occurred this fall term correlates to the decreased activity in the ’18 class because they weren’t here for the launch,” she said.
Multiple students interviewed said that decreased interest from upperclassmen may contribute to this decrease in participation.
In addition to initiatives targeting the Class of 2018, Improve Dartmouth has also recently renovated its site and plans to increase the size of its team.
A redesign of the website went online on Feb. 9, including a new user interface O’Connell described as “much sleeker and more modern.”
Improve Dartmouth is also looking to expand from its current six-member moderator team to a group comprised of around 20 students, O’Connell. With more members, Improve Dartmouth could create teams to manage various tasks, including idea implementation, publicity and technical services, she said. The moderator team would still function in a similar fashion, but would then be afforded a greater degree of flexibility.
Among the most popular accomplishments of the program, Improve Dartmouth brought new locations of the campus’s printing system, GreenPrint, adding stations in the Rockefeller Center and the Life Sciences Center.
O’Connell described this recent accomplishment as an “illustration of how Improve Dartmouth and Student Assembly have worked together to make an idea happen.”
While other improvements range from the installation of a door between King Arthur Flour cafe and the periodicals room in Baker-Berry Library to allowing DBA to roll over between terms, O’Connell said the most notable accomplishment has been the major revision to the sexual assault policy.
“The overall biggest idea that has been completed on the site and still the overall most popular idea on the site has been the zero-tolerance sexual assault policy,” she said.
Over one year ago, a student posted in favor of a zero-tolerance policy, which received 1,221 positive votes and 46 negative votes.
Dartmouth Roots advisor and Rockefeller Center program officer Vincent Mack said that Improve Dartmouth has been a huge success so far, citing the various completed projects as confirmation of the program’s achievement.
While he has served in an advisory capacity and offered feedback on various iterations of the site, he said that the decision-making rests in the hands of the students involved.
He said that Improve Dartmouth functions as a platform where both students and administrators collaborate to see real solutions implemented. Students develop creative ideas and post them on the site, then the Improve Dartmouth team pairs these ideas with the relevant administrators.
“It provides a way for ideas to be generated and for there to be a healthy dialogue around the feasibility of those ideas,” Mack said.
Ivan Carrier ’18 said that he has visited the site to vote on suggestions but has not submitted any ideas of his own and does not believe his class is very aware of Improve Dartmouth’s efforts.
Kyu Kim ’18 also said that many first-years have not been properly informed of the site, stating that his knowledge of Improve Dartmouth came through campuswide emails.
Vivian Hu ’16 said that she typically only thinks about the site when she receives campus-wide emails.
Julia Isaacson ’15 said she visits the site with less regularity, but the emails will occasionally prompt her to check in and vote on ideas.
