ITGS Blog Post

Your perception of the efficacy of the web presence we are trying to create (involvement of CA & help for victims)

In prior to discussion, this site will be definitely worthy as CA didn’t have any involvement with the earthquake in terms of technology. Knowing the fact that this would be our first step-up toward the Tohoku relief in the internet network, I think this is an unique idea. This is mainly because a lot of people are actually curious about this earthquake and they are going around social networking site such as Facebook to know more about it. Now since we have this forum that anybody can post what they want, people will be having easier time trying to get information about the earthquake. However, the degree of efficacy of this site is questionable. There surely will be some people (at least CA community) that would participate in this forum that we are trying to do. However, the question is now how are we going to pull outsiders to use this forum? I believe the fact that this forum is built by us would kind of limit the forum from going outside of the CA community extensively. This is because CA people will be the first ones to know about this forum. Once all those CA people start discussing bunch of things on the website, I think it would unintentionally drive out people who are outside of Canadian Academy. For example, if I were to see a discussion forum from an American highschool while surfing, I would be little hesitant to put post things up. I think it would be even more hesitant if I can see that people who have posted on the forum is all from the highschool. I think this is unavoidable reality. Therefore, I think without any spread of words, this forum can be very limited forum in terms of publicity. However, this also means that this could be quite global if we decided to resume something that could possibly grab other people’s attention. For example, CA community who has Facebook can write a post saying, “Here’s CA’s discussion forum regarding the Tohoku Earthquake. Check it out: LINK” This could cause friends of CA community who are outside of Japan to check the link and possibly write something about this crisis. Furthermore, some of the CA students can take initiative and talk to friends who are in states or other countries to write their opinions on the forum. I believe this is similar to auction. In fact, I think auction works better with more people viewing it. If there are more people looking at the auction, that means that there would be more people who would keep on betting money for the relief. This would definitely be a huge step forward for the victims if we manage to earn a lot of money out of this. In conclusion, I believe both auction and discussion forum are great ideas. However, in order to get the maximum from these two things, I think we need to do some sort of advertising as I have mentioned above. Until then, I believe that the sites would be very limited and would be only used by the CA community.

Your involvement in the process thus far

At first, Takaki, Mr. McEwen and I were searching to make a website where onlin donation is possible. However, as we researched, we noticed that we need school to open up an account along with a lot of complexities, we decided to move onto different project. This was the online discussion forum that we are currently still working on. Unfortunately, due to examination and preparation, I wasn’t as actively involved in this process of developing a discussion forum. However, Takaki and I had an idea of using something called “freedboard.” However, we had problem with this as it was not easy to manipulate the color of banners. As a result, we decided to get rid of freedboard. Next, we had bunch of different sites in mind, most of which Matt has presented. However, the issue is still regarding the banner color. Mr. McEwen showed his concern that if the color or design of the banner is different, people might be feeling hesitant. From then on, not much of progress has been made. As I have mentioned before, though I did some research along with discussion to contribute in making a discussion forum. My effort toward this wasn’t as great as Takaki or Matt as I have an IB exam coming up in less than a month.