Vice President Brad Stewart presented ASG’s new student feedback platform Campus Voice — which will allow students to ask questions, submit ideas and report problems about student life to the Senate — in a meeting Wednesday.
Users, who have to log into Campus Voice with their NetID, can comment on posts and vote them up or down to affect their prominence on the site, which should reduce spamming, Stewart said. ASG also has the ability to ban students from the site.
The idea for Campus Voice, which Stewart and ASG President Victor Shao first proposed as a campaign promise nearly nine months ago, came from a similar website created by the University of Virginia.
“I think it’s a big step in the right direction for ASG,” Stewart said. “[The program] has a couple of advantages. One, it puts our work front and center so students know what we are working on, and two, it really holds us accountable so that students are providing the feedback, and we are accountable to hear that feedback and make changes on it.”
Campus Voice is the latest component in a suite of online student services provided by ASG, which also includes JobCat, an online classified section for the Evanston-Northwestern community and NULink, a site that compiles links to campus schedules, news, services and information. McCormick senior Ethan Romba, the main developer of Campus Voice, said that this new service has “an incredible amount of value” for Northwestern students.
“All the different online services that ASG services hadn’t been that well publicized, and I would actually say that people tend to not really know about them,” Romba said. “Adding that consistent navigation bar at the top of every different service, that will help to let people know about all the different things that we offer.”
ASG’s Residential Conditions Working Group also discussed their recent tours of Elder and Kemper as a part of a larger project to provide needed renovations to residence halls and colleges. Both residences saw various improvements over Winter Break as a result of the group’s work. For example, a room in Elder that was once used for indoor bike storage was converted into a group study lounge with new carpeting and furniture over the break. The group plans to tour and survey the remaining residence halls and colleges by the end of the quarter.