The idea of an unoffical, student run alumni association first started being tossed around the CTY-L list in the summer of 1999. Despite much discussion and lots of plans, it has yet to really get off the ground. In the next couple of months, I'm going to be working to set up at least parts of the association, and see where it goes from there. The following webpage is a compilation of various e-mails I've written about the organization, and gives a pretty good idea of what I would like to see happen.

There are several things that I feel that the official CTY Alumni Association should be doing that it isn't doing. I have been talking to Holly on and off for the past year and a half, and the entire time she has promised that things will get better soon. At this point, I am slightly doubtful... however, if improvements are actual made the official alumni association, we will most likely need to rethink our purpose and such. For the moment, however, I feel that the purpose of the uOCTYAA is to do some of the things that the official association should be doing, but isn't.

I figure I should let you know where I'm coming from. My nomore year was in 1997, three years ago. I have a rather busy life outside of CTY... I have a full time job as a secretary for a lobbiest, I have a boyfriend who I've been dating for the past year. I have my own apartment, and I hope to go back to school real soon.

My eventual goal is to go into Gifted Education, specifically as a psychologist studying the mental and emotional effects of being gifted in today's society and discovering if there is any corolation between high intelligence and emotional problems, and if so what can be done about it, and also providing counseling to gifted students. CTY is a good starting place for this, I think.

I also think there are flaws in the program, which need to be fixed. I think a lot of the problem has to do with lack of community and communication. CTY, in a sense, is one big community divided into a lot of little communities. There are at least 15 separate mailing lists, and at least 50 webpages that I've found. There are probably hundreds of little groups of CTY friends, each with their own community and complaints. All of them have at least some problems with the program, usually with the administration. I've been monitoring a couple of these groups for a couple of years now, and I'm close friends with people in a one or two of them. A lot of the complaints are the same. However, because the groups are small and isolated, no one know that everyone has the same complaints, that people have been complaining about this for years. And no one knows how to get the Administration to listen.

Basically, if we can get a large enough group of people together, than we stand a better chance. If we could create some sort of organization, it might help in getting problems with the program fixed, at the same time providing cool services for those who are too old to go to CTY.

The five things that I would like the see the uOCTYAA do are outlined below:

• 1st: an extensive webpage for CTYers. This will be discussed in more detail later; however, I think that should be the first priority, as it can be used as a hub for all the other activities listed below.
• 2nd: an centralized e-mailing list. CTY-L is a very useful list; however, most younger CTYers don't even know that it exists. Currently, I send my reunion notices to about 15 separate mailing lists, all with a population that doesn't really overlap. It would be nice if we could organize some sort of central mailing list for all CTYers and promote it through the website. That way, instead of mailing information to 15 different lists, I could mail it to one list. Another possibility would be making it an announcement only list, or have a separate announcement only list. The biggest problem with this is actual making it a central mailing list as opposed to just another CTY mailing list.
• 3rd: Reunions. Currently, I organize reunions in DC about twice a year, and Tracy appears to have organized a similar reunion in Boston. I have noticed that, with a couple of exceptions, only DC locals attend the DC reunions. This means that the more places that host these reunions, the more people who will get to go. I can't organize reunions in other cities, because I don't know the cities well enough and I don't know how to get to them. However, if I could find people to organize reunions on a regular basis in at least Boston and New York, and possibly other places, it would be very happy.
• 4th: Student Outreach. Several people have proposed mentoring programs and other such things to JHU, and have met with little response. I would like to investigate these programs further, and see if they are feasible for the uOCTYAA to work on. Along a similar line, informing younger CTY students, probably through word of mouth at CTY campuses would also be very useful. It would be good if there were current CTYers who would volunteer to hand out fliers and such at CTY.
• 5th: Postal newsletter: this is probably the least important aspect, and will probably wait until everything else is done and running smoothly.

As the webpage is probably the most important part of this project, I'm going to outline briefly what I would like to see. Much of what I currently have on my page would move to the uOCTYAA page, as well as content created by other CTYers working on the site.

• NEWS: Info on what is going on with CTY, CTYers, and such. Updates on our dealings with JHU, news articles about CTY, stuff that is going on at the CTY campuses, upcoming events. Also, who and what we are. Includes a bulletin board for students to post news and class reviews.
• FRIENDS: Socialization and finding old CTY Friends, including a chat room, mailing list information, bulletin boards, an alumni database, passionfruit on-line, and possibly webhosting for CTY websites.
• CULTURE: The Canon, The CTY Hall of Fame, CTY history, essays and rants, and various links.
• FUNDS: Links to scholarships, both for CTY and for college, as well as some general college information.
• ACTIVISM: Resources for both CTY activism and gifted education activism, including a large selection of links, essays about CTY, and a discussion on the "Decline of CTY", as well as information on how to help the uOCTYAA.
• MIS.: Random junk, like who we are (ie, who is running this mess, thus who you should write with questions), site news, copyright info and disclaimers, etc.

After some discussion, I think the best way to get things rolling is to get people to volunteer to work on various parts of the project.

Here are a list of jobs which I think need to be done; if people have any comments or questions, or would like to volunteer to work on something, they should mail me at elizaweb@bigfoot.com.

• Server set up and maintenance: finding a server, setting it up for the use of the group, getting a domain name, and maintaining dealing with any server problems after everything is set up.
• Databases and bulletin boards: I know squat about squat about the technical side of this sort of thing; maybe this should be two jobs; I don't know. Someone to write, set up, and maintain bulletin boards, databases, chat rooms, and all that sort of stuff. Anyone who feels like filling me in on how one would go about creating that sort of thing feel free.
• Page layout and design: There are a lot of different web design tools (server side includes and cascading style sheets are the two I know about) that allow pages to have uniform layout by only putting in a few lines of code. Because ideally we will have different people working on different sections of the page, it would be good to have one person in charge of creating a uniform layout, and then showing what bits of code the people working on individual pages would have to put in, and where to put them, and going through and making sure all the stuff matches.
• Individual editors and writers for each section: basically, ideally, one person would be assigned to a section, and be in charge of creating and maintaining that section. (This makes the design and maintenance tasks small enough that if one person has to stop working on the project, they don't have a job so large to make it prohibitive for someone else to step in and take over)
  • News Editor: research CTY in the news, write the sections outlined above in the "news" section, and integrate BBs and stuff into the section.
  • Friends Editor: write the sections outlined above, maintain the BBs and links and whatnot on this page, maintain passionfruit online.
  • Culture editor: create and maintain all the stuff outline on this page.... this involves a lot of looking for broken links, and whatnot. Personally, I think this would be the most fun section to do... it also bears the most resemblance to what the typical student run CTY site is like.
  • Funds editor: pretty easy section... for the moment, it would seem to be just writing the pages and keeping links updated.
  • Activism editor: Creating and maintaining this section... someone who could write acrobat stuff might be useful. Also, maybe, trying to advertise this page, and dealing with JHU. This is the section that I am most interested in working on myself.
• Mailing list people: moderators for any related e-mailing lists
• Non-computer stuff: organizing reunions, handing out fliers, organizing outreach programs. Stuff like that. More details later.

If you are interested in helping out with the uOCTYAA, you can e-mail me at elizaweb@bigfoot.com