CONTENT: how to take control and make things at RIT better - a guide

[MoralCode]

a rough list of my tips gathered so far from my experience:

• you can submit work orders - help.rit.edu is becoming the single unified platform for all departments at RIT to handle service requests. RIT is a large, corporate machine - despite having lots of employees, it cant have eyes everywhere and cant fix things it doesnt know about. If you pick or search for the right request type, you can help get things fixed (or started to be fixed) a lot faster. This includes options for:
  • FMS work orders (real example: broken water fountain, loose/broken dividers in bathroom stall)
  • requesting improvements to apps RIT builds/maintains (TigerCenter)
  • fixing broken/unreliable projectors in classrooms (real example: they showed up in 20 minutes and interrupted class with a new projector)
• show up to SG committees (this is where pawprints go, and you can often bring things up to the same committees without needing the 200 signatures of a pawprint
• take advantage of and contribute to open source (like pawprints)
• always keep escalating (many RIT policies outline this anyway, but theres ALWAYS someone you can escalate to if need be)
• show up in person if you can, sometimes it can help/make you harder to ignore
• get to know people
• diplomacy first - never attribute to malice what can be explained by bureaucracy/rules/something you may not fully understand
  • ask questions in a way that allows you to learn (i.e. ask how something works or why it is there) - permanent employees know a lot more because they dont graduate after 4-6 years.
• if you need to go public/gather popular support for something, and internal discussions are not an option:
  • you can psot on pawprints
  • social media (reddit maybe)
  • RIT has a fully-independent student magazine that has the same free speech protections as any other news outlet. their office is in the basement of the campus center - you may also be able to leave tips anonymously - unknown if the mechanism for this works still

[MoralCode]

Trying out accessibly devices (like the door buttons and reporting them to FMS) may also be a good way to help your peers

[MoralCode]

find a creative way to say "when people tell you to get involved, treat it as an order, not a request/platitude" that doesnt give the wrong idea.

people in open source (is this actually a broader trend?) seem to have an attitude of forcefully getting involved with stuff (but politely) - theyll take stuff into their own hands and just keep trying things and contributing. there's always something you can do if things dont work out? (i.e. inactive maintaner not responding to your PR? fork the project and be your own maintainer!)