By Matt SpectorThe Daily Northwestern

A team of four Northwestern students is on a quest to make one of NU’s biggest nail-biters a little less stressful.

Their prototype Web site, the Residence and Tenant Evaluation Council, gives students a new way to review, rate and discuss places to live on and off campus.

The site’s founding group comprises two graduate students and two undergraduate students who developed the Web site as a part of their Online Communities class, taught in the School of Communication.

Since the site went online May 19, about 75 users have registered. There are more than 50 comments on the site’s dorm-specific discussion boards.

Communication junior Rishi Taparia said the goal of the class project was to develop an online community that would be of use to NU students.

Kaavya Paruchuri, site creator and Communication junior, said her group identified a need for a hub where students could discuss on- and off-campus housing. A similar program instituted by Associated Student Government, the Dorm Testimonials, Evaluations & Concerns program, has not been restarted since ASG let the program phase out in 2004.

According to the site’s creators, their effort is different from ASG’s lapsed system in that the new site combines a campus housing rating system with off-campus housing evaluations.

“This is something that people haven’t really looked at, especially off campus,” Paruchuri said. “There isn’t much of a resource that NU offers if you’re moving to Evanston.”

To date, the site’s creators have only added pages for what they considered the most popular living spaces on campus, but they said they plan to add pages for off-campus housing in the near future using user-generated content.

Taparia said his group members discussed how “nobody knows the different dorms on campus” and how current NU-affiliated Web sites only have basic dorm descriptions.

The Web site works like NU’s CTECs system by allowing students to give ratings and feedback, he said.

“It’s something, I think, that’s different,” Taparia said. “It’s a service that is not currently provided and would really benefit students, especially those who don’t necessarily have an insider’s look on the dorms or the residential colleges here.”

According to Vani Oza, one of the site’s creators, the project is still in its prototype phase, and the creators plan to add more features in the coming weeks.

“It is a work in progress,” the first year McCormick graduate student said. “We have the logo and some of the graphics, but we want to allow people to upload more pictures of the college or whatever they want to put on there.”

Paruchuri called the Web site an attempt to “consolidate a lot of information” on dorm and residential Web sites, which are sometimes uninformative and hard to find.

There are multiple ways users can interact with the site, Taparia said.

“You can become a registered user and add comments, or be a casual observer and read the comments and vote in the polls,” Taparia said.

Paruchuri said the site’s comment section will be one of the most useful tools for first-year students coming into residence halls and residential colleges, as well as current students finding out the best places to live on or off campus.

“The commentary – that’s the sort of thing people want to read,” Paruchuri said. “It’s students talking about forms of housing – it’s not going to be unbiased. Moderating that too much would be a disservice.”

Prof. Justine Cassell, who teaches the course for which the students made the site, said they did a “stellar” job on their final project and in assessing the needs of the NU community.

“I think that this group has understood the desire among NU students not just to get information but to be part of a community and share information,” Cassell said. “The community aspect of this is what makes it so powerful.”

Cassell said students go back and forth in their thoughts and feelings about where they live and create living communities.

Oza said their online community has already found considerable success.

“A lot of students who post in there are really eager to discuss their experiences,” she said.

The site’s creators said they want to continue building their Web site over the summer, taking it beyond a class project.

“One we have a stable system, we hope to propose it to ASG and see if they’d like to take it over and add it to NU Link,” Paruchuri said.

Reach Matt Spector at [email protected].