Start the countdown. The launch of DevilNet, a comprehensive web site and the University's first online community, is only 72 hours away.
Run almost entirely by undergraduate students, DevilNet will boast a fully operational community forum, tutor locator, ride locator and a classified advertising section.
Those who have already seen DevilNet are raving about its potential.
"DevilNet is easily the coolest, most useful site created by students I've seen, ever," said David Silver, director of the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies at the University of Maryland at College Park.
The idea of creating a virtual campus community was conceived in a public policy seminar taught in the fall of 1996 by visiting professor Frank Daniels. For their class project, 13 students began building the framework for an online community at the University.
"We always thought pretty big; our teacher really encouraged us," said DevilNet co-president and Trinity senior Brady Wood. "I think we really saw [that] this tiny little group project could turn into something really big. I think that's what really motivated [co-president and Trinity junior Jeff Horwich] and I. Luckily, we've been able to find this really big group of people who share the same values and same goals that we did."
The project quickly evolved into a house course last spring called "Policy Issues of the Digital Age, Community Building and the History and Technology behind Today's Internet." The course spawned the ideas for many of DevilNet's features, including interactive polls and online art galleries.
Wood and Horwich then began incorporating these smaller ideas into one single project-a dynamic, interactive web site to complement Duke's institutional site.
"The Duke web site was very one-way, and information was just flown to you from the web site," Horwich explained. "We started with the idea of interactive resources, and the very first thing we thought of is the idea of the interactive forum-using the Internet and the web, which students are really familiar with, as opposed to, say, newsgroups."
Before Monday, students can preview the site at http://devilnet.duke.edu.
DevilNet received recognition from Duke Student Government last spring, entitling the group to some University funding and allowing it to recruit students. The Office of Information Technology also donated a Sun Sparc 5 computer station to the group.
"OIT was just a boom to our group," Wood said. "[The Sun Station] is a very expensive piece of equipment-something that would have taken us, even if we were wildly successful, a couple of years to get."
DevilNet members, which include a 20-member advisory board and a 40-person e-mail list, realized that their project should not simply complement the University's site, but should bring together the online community.
"If Duke is ever to fully embrace the Internet, then its students need to be provided with a place in which they can congregate online," said Trinity senior Jessica Haaz, DevilNet's content director. "Otherwise, the Internet will fail to establish a presence on this campus. DevilNet allows Duke to embrace the interactive component of the Internet."
The organizers think DevilNet can become much more than a forum for discussion and a trading post for old CDs-a feature that should be available Monday. They envision it as a constantly changing source of information and opinion.
"We wanted to try and provide dynamic content in the form of columns," Horwich said. "We want to have people keep coming back. [President Nan Keohane] is going to be writing a monthly column for us as well. Things like that we can make available to students and make it a real dynamic experience."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.