Farewell to Spam

“Oh my God. 45 emails in my inbox? I just checked it three hours ago.” Such cries ring throughout Harvard. Every Harvard student knows the feeling of opening their email in hopes of finding new Facebook updates or news from friends, only to find 30 emails inviting them to attend different student group events.

The current event-publicizing model in which student groups spam as many list-serves as possible with event blurbs isn’t working. It’s annoying, ineffective, and limited in potential impact. Instead, in order to streamline event-publicizing on campus, University administrators should commit more resources to this problem and work with the Undergraduate Council to offer a new, more user-friendly online events calendar.

Every group sending out so many emails lowers the probability that each email will be read and runs the risk of alienating potential event attendees. Additionally, this type of publicizing often depends on students planning their schedules weeks or days in advance. Many students take things day-by-day and will go to events whenever they have time; because list-serves aren’t personalized to ad hoc schedules, emails can be completely ineffective when students delete them days before the event happens. Often, students only find out about interesting events the morning after they happen.

Students do share some blame for the inundation of emails. From the start of freshman year, whether because of our broad curiosity or plain indecisiveness, many of us have signed up on every group and event list that could ever even remotely interest us. But we wouldn’t have to do this if we had a more intelligent, refined online events calendar. Right now, students don’t use the current online events calendar, HarvardEvents, because it’s just too overwhelming—it’s one big mass of uncategorized daily events.

I’m not alone in this view—an improved events calendar was a central plank of the Bowman-Hysen campaign. This semester the UC is working with HarvardEvents creator, CS 50 Lecturer David J. Malan ’99, to categorize all the events. They are also considering requiring every group that gets UC funding to put their events on the calendar.

These changes are laudable. If they go through, students would have the ability to selectively search for whatever events—from “Celebrity Speaker” to “Cultural Dance Party”—they want to attend whenever their individual schedules will permit. However, they are not enough. The University should actively work with the UC—which has already taken some initiative—to take additional steps to make the improved events calendar more interactive and personalized.

Similar to Facebook events, students should have the ability to explicitly indicate whether they will be attending events. This will help event planners prepare for how many people will be coming and in addition, allow students to see which of their friends are coming. Each student’s interface should also be specialized, so students are able to choose their preferences—what topics they like and when they are generally available. Similar to Google News, the system should offer students event suggestions based on these preferences. If the University and UC are in need of inspiration, Stanford’s online events calendar has a very intuitive interface and would be a great model for Harvard to follow.

This new calendar should become the default publicizing medium on campus. While the UC’s idea to make funding contingent on using the events calendar is a good one, they should also actively discourage email spamming.

The goal of this initiative is clear. Students will have cleaner inboxes, greater access to information, and the freedom to selectively plug in and digest all this information. Club groups will also benefit because instead of just targeting their list-serve members, they will be able to present detailed information to the entire Harvard community. With the ability to plan and update their events-calendar section for the full year, they won’t be hassled with continuously sending multiple reminders for each event throughout the year.

Hemi H. Gandhi ’13, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Greenough Hall.