Students will be directly involved all stages of the Go Team, Go Green (GTGG) project: website design, contact with colleagues around Pac-12, social media promotion of the challenges, participation in the competitions, design of the participation certificates and award plaques, and judging of the non-UW school groups to determine who will receive those plaques. We detail some of the more complex aspects of this student involvement in the sections that follow.
Website design
The GTGG website will be the virtual home for the intercollegiate competitions. It will house the tools that participating school groups at all of the Pac-12 campuses will use to learn about the challenges, sign up their group for the competition, converse with their competitors, and record their sustainability successes. In order to raise interest and broaden participation, and because the students will want to promote their efforts on their own social media platforms, the GTGG website will also include a "news feed" culled from other social media sites; for example, filtering Instagram and Twitter posts to include those containing #GoTeamGoGreen. Our approach here will build on the successes of –as well as the lessons learned from– the peer-to-peer conversations promoted as part of the ISCFC (see http://footprint.stanford.edu/discuss): the successful climate awareness program for which Dr. Hodin is co-director.
Student involvement in the website design will occur in two phases in during Summer 2018. In Phase 1, participating students work together on overall "mock-up" design concepts for the website. All members of the Project Team will provide feedback, and our professional programmer (David Cohn) will put together a site architecture based on that design.
In Phase 2, once that site architecture is in place, Mr. Cohn will lay out one or more internal pages over which the students will have more programming and creative control. The students could then claim that page as something that they helped program, and would be credited as such. Examples of such student led aspects of the website could include the design of the page that lists the team line-ups and the "scoreboard" for game day, as well as the page element that runs news feeds from Instagram and Twitter with GTGG-related hashtags.
Contact with colleagues around Pac-12
Corina Yballa, Senior in the UW Program on the Environment (planned graduation: Dec 2018), is excited to lead the effort during Summer 2018 of coordinating with UW's "competitors" for the Fall and Winter. Among Ms. Yballa's first responsibilities will be following up on contacts we have already initiated with sustainability groups at CU, ASU and Stanford (see attached letters from all three campuses), and expanding those contacts to include at least five additional Pac-12 schools. Furthermore, Ms. Yballa, in coordination with our partner student groups at UW (see attached PAFs), will begin to make concrete plans for the Fall season competitions, including documenting the guidelines for participating in and judging the competitions, and establishing a social media presence for GTGG. During this period, Ms. Yballa will be closely coordinating with UW athletics (see attached PAF from Karen Baebler) to plan for their promotion of the GTGG challenges, and for the possibility of announcing of winners during halftime.
Sometime during the Fall, Ms. Yballa will help us identify and train another student lead who will take over for the remainder of the project. The student lead in the Fall and Winter will work closely with the partner ("competitor") schools to plan the final details for the challenges, continue the social media presence, and work as a liaison to University digital and print publications to promote the competitions.
Participation in the challenges
The groups taking part in the challenges will be student groups on the two campuses that have ongoing or planned sustainability efforts. Participating groups could be dormitories, clubs, fraternities or any other student grouping. Non-student UW groups are also welcome to join. First, the group will register on the GTGG website (which will add them to our participant page, and provide a link to their website if any). Then, they will use the microblog bulletin board to introduce their sustainability efforts, and announce what they plan to accomplish during the upcoming game week. During the week, they will post updates on the microblog and social media, as they choose.
We will provide tools that will help participants analyze the environmental impact of their plans (see the Explain How the Impacts Will Be Measured section, above), but ultimately what constitutes a 'sustainability effort' is entirely up to the group in question. These could range from traditional approaches –such as working to enhance recycling rates in dormitories– to less traditional endeavors –such as producing an original music video about ocean plastic. The student group is responsible for describing their efforts in a persuasive and engaging manner to the judges and the public at large.
Choosing a winning competitor
On game day, the previous week's posts from the student groups on the competing campuses will be judged by students from a third Pac-12 school not competing that week. So for example, the student judges of the UW-Stanford competition might be from Oregon State. We do not foresee judges being overly reliant on numeric assessments alone. Our judging criteria will encourage artistic expression and storytelling as effective aspects of sustainability that could be rewarded. Furthermore, we want to give creative latitude to the judges in announcing winners. We can, for example, imagine winners in different categories: most creative post, lowest carbon group, most ambitious sustainability effort during the week. We will encourage the judging school to announce the categories in advance, so we can post them during "competition week" on the GTGG website's interactive scoreboard, alongside a line-up of the competing groups.
At the end of the Fall and Winter seasons, the UW students involved in the project will choose a winning (non-UW) competitor, which will receive a student-designed plaque to hang in their dormitory or club office. All school groups that qualify for award consideration will receive certificates of participation that they can distribute to individual students.