Overview On Sunday, September 29th, we interviewed NW in upstairs Paresky where they usually do their homework. NW is a sophomore Williams student involved with CLiA. They did an internship with CLiA over this past summer, which was their introduction to the group. During the internship, NW met with community and nonprofit leaders from around Berkshire county and did an independent project revamping the website for the Louison House. NW now serves as the head of communications for CLiA. Before the interview we outlined some basic questions and topics that we wanted to hit during the interview. The interview was mainly an informal interview with a contextual inquiry component. We asked NW about how they got involved with CLiA (through an internship advertised on Daily Messages), the work they and other interns did over the summer, the different opportunities CLiA provides during the summer and during the school year, and the work they do as head of communications. For our contextual inquiry, we asked NW to walk us through the steps they usually took to broadcast an opportunity to engage with the wider Berkshire community to the campus community and also what steps they, as a student, take to find out about the opportunities available.

What we learned We learned about a number of community events and service opportunities, both one-time and recurring. As they handle communications in their work with CLiA, they are responsible for publicizing these events to the student body. For the contextual inquiry component of our meeting, we asked them to show us how they would go about publicizing this information, and how they would suggest students access it if interested. This was informative as it showed us the main mediums through which they felt information on community engagement opportunities would be most readily accessible. These primarily included daily messages, the CLiA listserv/ email mailer, and the CLiA facebook page. Since this person was in charge of publicizing the kind of events that we are interested in, we were able to ask more specific questions about student engagement. They told us that they felt student engagement was lower on one-time events than it was through recurring programs, which they classified as CLiA’s main focus. They speculated that this was the result of the busy schedules, the difficulty of knowing what events are happening if you’re not specifically and consistently looking (i.e. daily messages are not tailored to the individual and thus are often not relevant to what the reader is interested in, so students frequently don’t read the messages), and, notably, the difficulty of transportation. With regards to the second point, they said that while CLiA was the main way they would go about finding information about community events, the events publicized by CLiA are mainly service-oriented. As a result, even students who do pay attention to these resources still may not have any idea about the many non-service community events. This is interesting because non-service events contribute to a sense of community in a different (and equally important) way than service focused events do, and may be more likely to attract students with limited time, as it would be done for their own enjoyment. Additionally, a main way that students can learn about off-campus opportunities specific to their interests is by going and speaking with the head of CLiA (Paula Consolini) directly, as there is no single platform on which information is aggregated. The difficulty of transportation was something that we hadn’t thought much about but that this conversation showed us would be an important problem to consider, as it is something that could greatly hinder the ability of our project to enable engagement off campus.

Reflection and next steps We were able to get in touch with NW rather easily because they were friends with one of our group members (not present at the interview to avoid unconscious bias). Since NW didn’t have any opportunities to broadcast at the time of the interview and was not looking for an event either, we were not able to conduct a true contextual inquiry. Instead, we conducted a retrospective inquiry by having NW describe what they would do to find an event they were interested in participating in. They gave us the contact information for Paula Consolini and suggested that we contact them for more information about how CLiA events are set up. For remaining research meetings, we hope to be able to do a contextual inquiry more properly. This should be possible because the people we plan to talk to next engage more consistently with specific processes we are curious about. As the student we interviewed had not yet done advertising work, they could only talk us through the way in which they collected information themselves. We plan to do our remaining meetings with people who are not students: specifically we have contacted the person in charge of publicizing events for the music department (whose audience is primarily non-collegiate Berkshire residents) and Paula Consolini. We are waiting to hear back from these individuals to see whether they are available and, if so, schedule meeting times.