Last term I was a part of GBDA X, which was an extra curricular run by a staff member of the UWaterloo Stratford Campus. I was very excited to be a part of it again this term, because I had a lot of fun in it last term, and it gave me something to do on Tuesday evenings. So when it was eventually revealed that GBDA X would not be happening again this term (cause UWaterloo admin sucks), I was disappointed (as were many others).
A girl in third-year GBDA and I were talking about how we were sad it wasn't happening again and off-handedly I mentioned how it wouldn't be hard to run it ourselves. A couple days later, she took me up on my comment. She asked if I would be interested in running it with her. We could still use campus to meet and use the things the campus provides, like printers and tech. I was totally down. It wouldn't be that much more effort to run than just participate, and since the entire concept of the group is that the students come up with the idea, we wouldn't have to actually prepare anything. We would just need to gather people together.
We talked to the guy who ran GBDA X last term to ask if it was ok/allowed. He said it was, as long as it was kept under wraps. The university can't stop students from working together on something, but they could stop 'a group from using University spaces'. So we're a 'secret' group, with an unofficial mentor in the original GBDA X facilitator. We call ourselves Project X.
We just had our second meeting; we meet once a week for a couple of hours. I really like the idea that we've come up with. We're going to create a sort of data visualization program that people can influence by interacting with an interface. It will create a generative design art piece which will hopefully be displayed on the micro-tile wall in the atrium. I've been assigned the role of coder along with 4 others...it will be interesting trying to code something with other people. I'm going to have to brush up on my programming skills, because I haven't coded since second year. I'm really excited to have something on the micro-tile wall and be able to say 'I made that'. Hopefully we can pull it off!
