Aggietalk.org Omar Ghannoum & Peter Mack Grubb

Overview  Website for matching language partners at Texas A&M  Cultural and linguistic exchange  Anyone with can use website  The idea originated because both of us are taking foreign language classes

Objectives  Build the website  Attract a linguistically diverse user base  Have a high degree of user engagement  Find an organization that can continue to maintain the site

Strategies  Website is a social network  Limited potential user base  Specific focus  Wordpress Content Management System used  Easy to use for less technically inclined  Still highly flexible for our needs  Promotion done via organizations with large international base  INTS, Arabic and Chinese clubs, fliers  Planning to hand off to International Studies student professional organization  Costs for hosting minimal (36$) so paid out of pocket

Challenges  New Student Organization process is too bureaucratic  Trouble with A&M webhosting policies  Required the use of Drupal  Did not allow for unfiltered student posting  Too many liability concerns  Establishing a relationship between the English Language Institute

Successes  Around eight pairings were made, including myself  Users were very satisfied  Had students come up to us in class and tell us what a good Idea it was  Influx of users after contacting International Studies Department  Connected with International students as well as local Texas A&M students

What we learned  We are very resilient  We are effective leaders and communicators  When developing in a niche market, it is always more difficult to get started  However, if it meets a need you will get a large user response  In order for the website to be successful, we had to always be on top of things

Assessment  The good news: The final user count was 93  Split about 60/40 native vs. international students  The bad news: total number of Language Partners was 8  Caused by the timing people joined (international students after INTS)  Relatively late in the school year  Many pairings occurred where the user didn’t click “add as Language Partner”  High level of community involvement

Conclusion  Project was all in all a success  Pairing Numbers were not as high as we would like, but community interest was most definitely there  Strong publicity push in the early Fall would probably lead to much better results  If this were a startup, we are ready for funding round 2