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Reaching Out

One of the tasks that I have been pursuing for a number of months relates to a committee that I chair. My primary professional association, the Mathematical Association of America, has set up a committee to address student concerns that are not directly related to conferences. As students are the next generation of mathematicians we have a strong incentive to make them first-class citizens within our community.

My committee identified informally some students to serve as a focus group and interviewed them in the Fall. They had a number of different concerns but one common thread was a feeling of disconnection from the MAA.

This felt a bit ironic as the MAA has committed in the past year a number of resources to establishing a community framework for its members, MAA Connect. Members identify communities that they wish to participate in or are on committees for, and there is a framework for posting comments, digests of posts, libraries for sharing documents, etc. There is room for improvement but it already serves a good deal of my needs as a senior faculty member.

Which are not the needs of a student. One of the issues that came up was that the primary technological means of establishing these communities on MAA Connect were not reaching many students: emails and web pages.

So we're currently looking at other technical options. At this moment (and it may change) it sounds as if Discord would be a good starting point. I want to gather more technical information for our committee to discuss, but we seem to be heading toward a pilot program of having interested students run/moderate a modest Discord community with some honorarium/grant/fellowship/remuneration and supervision from the MAA.  So far the folk that I have discussed this with have been more excited than I expected, so this may be addressing a need that people are aware of. Time will tell.

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