IT enables communication for Lee Festival Choir
Major news organizations won’t be the only ones posting firsthand coverage of the 2013 Presidential Inauguration on January 21st – the IT department at Lee University will be, too.
This year, 200 choir members from Lee are scheduled to sing at the U.S. Capitol as part of the ceremony that will ring in Barack Obama for his second and final term as President of the United States.
IT plans to be right behind the students in terms of letting everyone interested in the Lee community see and hear what the performers are experiencing up-close.
As students snap candid pictures, they will have the opportunity to send their shots to IT’s private Flickr account.
Flickr is a photo-sharing website that allows the user to upload pictures to the site itself, and also to share the photos on other sites.
According to Nate Tucker, Director of IT Systems, IT will stream some of the photos from the Flickr account that students upload to the university’s website, where there will be a scroll feature to view them.
“When our Flickr gets populated with pictures, I’ll see them and choose which ones will go on our official inauguration page,” Tucker said.
IT Systems notified the students of this technology by printing out enough business cards for each student to have one.
The cards display the email address to which they can send the photos, as well as the official inauguration tags and hashtags for Facebook and Twitter designated by the White House.
In addition to facilitating communication between the Lee Festival Choir and the Lee community about what’s going on at the inauguration, IT is also using Regroup to allow leaders on the D.C. trip to transmit important information to a large number of students, without pulling their hair out.
Regroup, according to its website, is an emergency notification and efficient group messaging tool.
IT already uses Regroup to send mass emails from the university to students on a near-daily basis, and it adapted its use of Regroup for this trip.
Leaders can use Regroup to send a mass text message to which no one can reply.
The no-reply function results from Regroup’s use of a different random, unused phone number every time it sends a mass message.
“This way, leaders can send reminder messages to tell students they’re loading the bus, or that they need to be in a certain place by a certain time, without overloading everyone’s phones,” said Morgan Adams, IT Systems Project Manager.
As with many projects in the IT department, staff organized several periods of testing to ensure that the program was working properly before they granted access to the Music Department.
As of now, all systems are a go for this weekend and Inauguration Day.