The ASWSU Senate met on Jan. 22 to discuss several matters, including ethics violations and a business pitch from a university marketplace app.
Concerning the ethics violations, Associate Justices Nahian Sarwar and Alena Haynes presented the ASWSU Judicial Board opinion on the pending matter involving Senators Taryn Beck and Cassidy Collins.
The Judicial Board found Collins in violation of the ethics title of the ASWSU Bylaws for statements made during an ASWSU Zoom meeting. The Judicial Board also found Beck in violation of the same ethics title for statements made to a friend during a different, in-person meeting.
The ASWSU Senate also heard from Tanner McCraney, co-founder of the college marketplace app Rumie, via Zoom.
McCraney said he set out to create a safer alternative for students to buy and sell their belongings across college campuses after being robbed during a Facebook Marketplace transaction during his time in college.
“I started asking college students all around the country, ‘How do you buy and sell around campus?’” McCraney said. “This led me through a rabbit hole of the various problems that we wanted to solve with the Rumie campus engagement platform.”
McCraney said many of the campuses he surveyed experienced three main problems. The first problem was that universities fail to provide students with a “safe, private, campus-only marketplace.”
While Facebook Marketplace is an option for WSU students, he said many students feel weary about meeting with strangers in unfamiliar places.
“College students go to Washington State so that they just interact with college students there, but oftentimes for essentials like tickets, textbooks, furniture and clothing, they’re having to meet up off campus, potentially putting themselves in a dangerous position,” McCraney said.
McCraney said there is a lack of safe moderated campus chats provided by universities.
“I’m sure you’ve heard horror stories of Yik Yak on campus,” McCraney said. “It’s unmoderated, it’s anonymous [and] it’s very unproductive for campuses.”
GroupMe and the WSU Mobile app have similar shortcomings, McCraney said. He also said it is difficult for students to know what is occurring on campus.
McCraney said he wanted to solve all three of these problems by creating a campus app that could handle safety, marketplace transactions, engagement on campus and communication.
The market feature on Rumie was designed to improve on the safety issues and inefficiencies of other similar platforms. The campus chat feature also has measures in place to address instances of behavior deemed inappropriate, with both marketplace listings and chat messages being moderated and easily reportable by students, McCraney said.
The stock version of the Rumie app is fully available for WSU students to use. Students can download the app and sign in with their WSU email to access its base features, including buying, renting and selling belongings through the marketplace and moderated campus chats. Students also have access to a school-wide event calendar, he said.
Student government bodies like ASWSU can also gain access to the analytics of the app, which can help make decisions based on student activity, McCraney said.
The cost of partnering for a fully customized version of Rumie would be covered by WSU with an implementation fee of $1,000 and an additional $450 per month for maintenance. The integration process usually takes 10 weeks McCraney said.
The Senate also heard from Sophie Kirov, Univeristy Affairs deputy director, who shared plans from her department for the senate. Among her announcements were plans for an upcoming hair drive, progress on the development of a food insecurity app for students and discussions with ASWSU’s Environmental Sustainability Alliance for Earth Day.
Jonah Oh, Student and Academic Affairs deputy director, closed things out, informing the Senate of the returning Green Day festival.
The Green Day festival is an event meant to raise awareness for mental health issues and normalize conversations about them, Oh said. The focus of the event will be student outreach opportunities and sharing of mental health resources. Green Day is set to take place from 1–4 p.m. on April 10.