To foster smoother, fuller blending of town and college groups, we propose having a “united space-scheduling office.” All you would have to do — to borrow a room in the moment, reserve a room for a future moment, or schedule a regular meeting space — would be to go to this office.

The office would essentially be a person with a big binder or master schedule of participating spaces. The spaces could include rooms (obviously based on willingness and availability) in College buildings, public school buildings, the Apollo, City Hall, the public library and the “Bridge” backspace, the Depot, the New Union Center for the Arts, rooms at the Oberlin Inn, semi-private or commercial spaces (including lobbies, lounges, and meeting rooms), temporarily empty storefronts, the hospital, Splash Zone and athletic fields and spaces.

Some of these entities and areas would offer a lot of spaces that would be available often; others would have much less to offer. They could also put some restrictions on the types of uses of their spaces.

The benefits:

–Simplify getting a location for your group

–Get better locations

–Inter-mingling of people who tend to be in different buildings

–A single calendar of the open groups and public events

–Enable your space to host a rich variety of activities, without your having to do any “programming” work

Further, it could promote natural connections such as biology study groups that cross age lines, people being able to watch and talk about the same video clips at the same time, groups being able to teleconference with friends in another city at the same time, and much more.

The scheduling office should be in a central location, ideally downtown. It would be good for the office to have late night hours.

—Henry Harboe
College sophomore

—Bill Derrah
College first-year

—Aliza Weidenbaum
Oberlin resident