About

This is the website of Cooper Union's Art Student Council. It's designed to be a toolkit aiding students in enacting transparency and accountability — rather than just talking about these things — in a way that is itself transparent and accountable. (For more on that, see the philosophy section below.)

Art Student Council's notes have been cited by the New York Times, printed and stapled to the walls of the building by our readers, and spawned many online discussions in the viral sharing of meeting content. Who woulda thunk?

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Stay In The Loop

With a bunch of Student Council members using this site as a scratchpad and clearinghouse for information, it may seem difficult to keep track of everything going on. However, there are several ways you can stay updated:

By Text Message

Text "Follow CooperASC" to 40404 and you'll get a message like the one below every time the site changes:

@CooperASC: [http://cooperasc.github.com] http://cooperasc.github.com/commit/... Casey Gollan - adding faculty meeting non-notes

These notifications are free, but if you don't have unlimited text messaging your carrier may charge you.

You can unsubscribe from these notifications at any time by texting "Stop" to 40404.

On Twitter

Follow @CooperASC on Twitter, which tweets every time the site changes.

By Checking the Commit History

If you prefer not to get notified about every little change, but still want to check in from time-to-time, vist the site's commit history to explore a log of site changes.

Add and Edit Content

Anyone who is a member of student council can create new pages and edit any page on this site.

Creating a new note

The easiest way to add new notes is through an online text editor called Prose.

1. Visit http://prose.io and sign in with your Github account
2. Under Organizations, find CooperASC and click it to enter our group's files
3. Click CooperASC.github.com to enter the contents of this site
4. Click the folder for Notes
5. In the top right click + New File, to be taken to the editing interface for a new note

Editing a note

There are three parts of every note

1. Filename — contains the date and URL name
2. Metadata — structured information like title, author, and tags
3. Content — where your write your content

1. Filename

The filename determines a note's date and URL text. Notes which do not follow the following filename format will not appear on the site:

/_posts/notes/YYYY-MM-DD-title-firstname.md

Make sure you have:

• a properly formatted date
• seperated words with dashes (NOT spaces)
• written in lowercase
• omitted unneccesary words like "meeting" for brevity

For example:

/_posts/notes/2013-03-04-faculty-casey.md

2. Metadata

A note's metadata is a list of information like the title, notetaker (that's probably you), and associated committees. Metadata also determines a bunch of site-related functions such as where to display a note, what layout to use, and if it's published or private.

To edit metadata in Prose, hit the toolbar button labeled Metadata. A drawer will open below the toolbar with the following preset text.

category: notes
layout: notes-single
published: true
title: Meeting or Note Title
notetaker: Firstname Lastname
tags: committee-name
filepath: _posts/notes/filename.md

You can edit everything after the colons (:). The category:, layout:, and published: fields are already correct, but you'll want to change the title:, notetaker:, tags:, and filepath: fields reflect your particular note. Below, you can see a completed set of metadata:

category: notes
layout: notes-single
published: true
title: Emergency Meeting of The Faculty of the School of Art
notetaker: Casey Gollan
tags: faculty
filepath: _posts/notes/2013-03-04-faculty-casey.md

Note metadata properties, explained:

Property	What it means and [options]
category	What section of the site this content is displayed in. The site sections are the folders beneath /_posts. [about, committees, notes, people]
layout	What layout to display this content with. Available layouts are in the _layouts directory. [default, index, about-index, committees-index, notes-index, people-index, notes-single, people-single]
published	Determines whether or not a page is generated for this content. If a file is set to private and saved it will not be shown on index pages or have a webpage generated for it, BUT it will still be publicly visible in the Github repository. [private, published]
title	The page title as it will be displayed to readers. Whereas the filename should be terse (e.g. faculty.md), this field can be descriptive. [e.g. Faculty Meeting]
notetaker	The name of the author. If the notetaker field matches the name of a profile in the /people section of the site, the site will atuomatically link to their profile from the note, and link to their notes from their profile. [e.g. Casey Gollan]
tags	A comma-separated list of dash-separated tags to aid searching and sorting of notes. If the same tag is used in multiple notes, the site will automatically link between them in the Tools sidebar. Standardized tags exist for committees, but new ones may be invented as needed for non-committee meetings or notes. [student-council, faculty-administration, board-chair, fun, faculty, documents-received, art-student-body]
filepath	The filepath should match your completed filename, with no beginning slash. You can copy-and-paste it from the filename box. This steps is somewhat redundant, but important! If a filepath is present, the site will show readers handy shortcut links to where they can edit and review the history of your content. If the filepath is incorrect, readers will end up at a broken link and be very confused, so be sure to test your sidebar links out after publishing! [e.g. _posts/notes/2013-03-04-faculty-casey.md]

Adding and Remove Members

Creating new People pages

So you've been added to the Organization on Github, great! This means that you can now edit the site, so the first thing you should probably do is make yourself a page on the site. To add a new person page, create a new file in /_posts/people titled 0100-01-01-firstname-lastname.md. The required metadata is as follows:

category: people
layout: people-single
published: true
title: Firstname Lastname
class: Senior
tags: committee-name
preferred_email: [email protected]
gravatar_email: [email protected]
permalink: /people/firstname-lastname/


category: people
layout: people-single
published: true
class: Senior
title: Casey Gollan
tags: board-chair, admissions
preferred_email: [email protected]
gravatar_email: [email protected]
permalink: /people/casey-gollan/

Adding Committees

Larger Site Changes: Editing Locally

Desktop Git Clients

For those who are not comfortable with Git's command line interface, Github has decent clients for Mac and Windows that make cloning, pushing, and pulling a single-button affair.

Philosophy

Git & Github

• Collaboration
• Redundancy
• Archival
• Transparency
• Clone / Fork / Push / Pull

Jekyll

• Why flat file?