My involvement with the Voice began in early March when, after talking to Miran and Steven, I first became familiar with their idea of a new student publication. Cautiously I jumped aboard, only to soon realize what a great experience it would be.

Pompously named “the web director of the Voice”, my first and foremost task has been to create and maintain the online environment for our writers to post content and our editors to edit and position it. There a couple of things we wanted the website to have:

First it needed to be interactive as the underlying point of the Voice is that a publication can best serve the interests of the community by nurturing and encouraging interaction between its core team and the students. To this end, our website has features such as commenting, rating system, blogs for students and student groups. Second, we wanted multimedia. And lots of it! Besides the image gallery, you’ll notice that our feature articles have videos specially made for them. Moreover, in future we’ll take full advantage of Brightcove, the impressive video managing and publishing software that we employ on our website.

Third, we wanted it to look original and different from other news reporting websites. I believe this originality is captured in the characteristic color scheme that indeed makes our website unique.

Pressed by time, the Voice website could only be made so complex and dynamic. But, do we have ideas in store! And, amazingly, all the tools are there. In fact, the website for the Voice stands on the shoulders of another great community – the community of open-source software developers.

Drupal, the framework which manages the Voice website, is an excellent example of what can result when thousands of volunteers and enthusiasts from all over the world come together and write good code. It’s hard not to notice the similarity between the open-source community and the community the Voice is trying to nurture – the one where everything starts with individuals and their eagerness to raise issues that are of importance to all of us, and for the benefit of the whole student body.

Just as I believe in the need for a publication such as the Voice on campus I also believe in the creativity of Harvard students to take on such endeavor. The Voice is written by us, the students, and for us. The same philosophy applies to the website. Given the amount of incredible and free tools available, we owe it to ourselves to put them to use for our community.

So, join the team! Seriously, it’s not much more than curiosity and eagerness to learn that got us this far. I promise a great learning experience and immense satisfaction in seeing this project, which belongs to all of us, grow. As Miran put it – it’s going to be a fun ride!