PWC

ENG 2710 Final Project Guidelines

Imagine a rich foundation is giving you $100,000 to create a vibrant Web site to serve a community of your choice. What magic could you perform?

“Community” is defined broadly here to represent a geographic location or a group: Lyndonville, the Northeast Kingdom, Littleton; Vermont dog owners, Newport motorcycle riders.

The site needs to meet a few guidelines:

It must be interactive.

It must be updated frequently.

It must include multimedia.

It must display an ability to become self-sustaining.

What bells and whistles would you put on your site?
How many people would work for it?
What would the home page look like?
What would you link to?
How would you attract readers?
Bonus: Are there items you could include on your site that we haven't talked about in class?

Feel free to bounce ideas off me.

Due: May 1
Length: 4 to 5 pages, double spaced.









Eric Downing
2710
Procrastinators Web Community
The perfect web community for people like me. This web page will be updated daily, if we get around to it. Here at the procrastinators of the academic world website, our motto is “Better Tomorrow Than Today.” But seriously, this web page is more about support than encouraging late papers.
Who staffs the PWC? There are two web masters, one who updates the news feeds and works on any bugs, while the other web master's job is content management. Of course, depending on if one job has a lot of work to be done, the two can work together in the constant struggle to get updates on time. There will also be interns as this community grows.
Students will join PWC for its interactivity, its innovation, and its support. Upon joining, a new member is given the opportunity to create an avatar to represent him or her during her or his travels on the site. This avatar is highly customizable and can be altered at any time. A student's unique avatar can reflect his or her mood (an option which can be selected from the user's profile) by pantomiming the feeling. The purpose of the avatar is not only draw users to the site, but also to make the user feel more comfortable and like a part of the community.
A User is also given an academic calender in which he or she can put important test and assignment dates. The user can also activate a system that notifies her or him about upcoming deadlines at varying times before the date comes up (you could select between a few days and a few weeks, for example). A user can also request to receive these notifications through another email service. As assignments get completed, a user can check it off on her or his calender. To make transportation of files easier as well, the PWC would feature limited storage space with easy access that a user could upload a document to.
Using some of the vast (but still limited funding), PWC would get an endorsement by Google so that users could sign in using their Google accounts, and chat while browsing the site. This integration would allow better use of RSS, as well as make checking the deadline calender easier and unavoidable.
Another feature that would be worked toward for PWC would be music to work by. We could feature an online radio station that plays music that's conducive to study. PWC and the radio station could endorse each other effectively as business partners.
A big part of PWC would be the community itself. One could post a soon-due paper in a “peer-review” section to have it proofed by a volunteer before turning it in. Volunteers would be enlisted from Colleges, as students there know the true meaning of procrastination. They could also write columns about procrastination stories as well as methods for coping with stress.
Volunteers wouldn't be the only ones to read a given student's article, however. Over time, the community of PWC would hopefully become self-sustaining as members start to read and review each other's work and offer input.
News featured on PWC would be filtered by the content manager to relate to the community. To aid this process, an occasional survey would be sent out to members, to find out about interests and to give feedback on the site. This would help PWC grow and develop in a way that would suit the community, which is the most important aspect for such a website.
To further make the PWC member-operated, users would be encouraged to send in procrastination stories and stress-coping methods, as well as cramming methodology to be reviewed by the content manager. Users can freely post such content on his or her own profile, but in order for a post to become a featured article, it either has to catch the content manager's eye, or receive much acclaim from the community. Users could also send small videos or podcasts, but a very small number of these would be featured, as they take up so much space.
Although members get much input on the PWC, certain behavior will NOT be tolerated. Any discriminatory language will NOT be accepted. Instances in which a user abuses his or her privilege to use the site by using racist, sexist, homophobic, or anti-semitic language will be immediately suspended from the site for a period at the discretion of the web master. Further instances will get a user kicked from the community. The only thing that the PWC will discriminate against is discriminatory behavior. Users can also get warnings from insulting other users' work and otherwise being abusive. We want the PWC to be as friendly as possible so that all can feel welcome to share their work without fear of ridicule.
PWC would feature a few games, but none so addictive that they'd stop work. For example, PWC's version of solitaire would say during each Deal, “Don't you have a paper to do?” Users with more control could set it so that games are disabled until all immediate assignments have been uploaded.
The problem with starting a web community is just that: starting it. PWC will need a flashy homepage. I'm thinking purple with Neon blue writing of the words “Procrastination Web Community”. Below that it could say “come study with us, if you have time.”
The site will have many instances of humor regarding the speedy way in which its users often have to complete their work. There will be links to Google (a great search engine), as well as other sites with academic themes. With luck, PWC will be able to form some partnerships with websites that help instruct users about popular topics such as Shakespeare and Physics.
Because of daily updating, hopefully the PWC could have its own word-processor built right in so that users could just do their work on the site. It could be downloadable too, in case a user didn't have Word at home.
Legal stuff: Firewalls and other anti-hacker junk. Filters to prevent inappropriate content from hitting the site. All that Jazz.

Now I kind of want to make this website for real....