INCKU : An online community and directory for NCKU and Tainan

Being a foreigner and studying as an international student in National Cheng Kung University at the somewhat rural city of Tainan in southern-Taiwan is nothing simple. Compared with my previous Taipei experience at the Gong-Guan Shi-Da area, I would say things here are a little bit different and they take time getting used to. Taipei folks have websites, magazines, newspapers and are generally in a somewhat international oriented environment with supporting services and information mostly available in English - while we here in Tainan don’t have all that. We also lack a sense of community in helping one another, while Taipei has a more established longer running widely adapted internationals community.

After a month or so of endless challenges in getting things done in Tainan and trying to figure out how things work in my university, seeing that I’m not the only one facing those, I just figured this has got to become a community effort.

Since in recent years I’ve become somewhat proficient in the art of building community websites, I quickly played around and setup something called INCKU. It’s always nice hearing people guess what the I stands for - “me & NCKU“, “international NCKU”, “ai - 愛 NCKU” (”love NCKU” in Mandarin Chinese), and maybe it’s best kept unknown so people will make their own sense into this.

It’s been running for a while now, and has been growing steadily with time. There is also growing interest within NCKU from both academic staff and Taiwanese students and it’s nice that this might become a more multi-cultural website. Recently, the INCKU team has been asked to write something for the NCKU-IIM newsletter, and I think it might be interesting for you to read :

National Cheng Kung University, as part of a Taiwanese Ministry of Education multi-year academic internationalization plan, has been investing great efforts into promoting the internationalization of the university, resulting in what seems as an unprecedented increase in the number of international students attending the university. The Taiwanese MOE recently reported a 4 years 400% rise in the number of international students pursuing degrees in Taiwan (from ~1000 to ~5000), with our own NCKU showing the highest growth rate, mainly due to the newly implemented all-English IMBA program. Just wait and see what’s going to happen next year.

We, the international students who came to study here in NCKU-Taiwan, are regularly facing unique challenges in our lives resulting mainly from culture and language differences. The most basic of those difficulties is surrounding knowledge availability in English, having to do with insufficient resources for performing required tasks – it’s VISA and ARC issues, following school regulations, conducting research activities, etc. maybe even more basic tasks like finding food and housing. In this kind of situation it is up to us to find a way to share information and make it available for our friends, class-mates and the future students. We need some sort of a community to collaborate on making things easier for us to focus on what we came here to do.

But a community is about more than that. It’s about being able to work together better towards a common goal, and in our case – our IIM MBA and PhD programs. We’re all taking part in courses that require us to work together in teams with people from other cultures and face new challenging material that isn’t always easy for us to understand. This is where a community would really make a difference. Finding a way for us to interact with each other in a structured way, keeping track of what we did and how it was done, letting us arrange things in a way that would make sense - is vital for our success in our program. The way we’re usually doing that here is through e-mails and direct communication, but that results in having 30-40 hard-to-follow emails a day from various sources or having nothing written at all. For those later joining our team or those who weren’t part of previous discussions it’s almost impossible to fully fill in the gap.

To help with all that, we’ve come up with INCKU, an online community aimed at helping us with the information gap and hopefully making it easier for us to collaborate with each other. INCKU offers you, the international student, a variety of community features, all in English:

• The Tainan directory is a directory of Tainan based venues – coffee shops, restaurants, pubs, night clubs, movie theaters, night markets, gyms and SPAs. Every entry shows you where that venue is located on a Tainan map, most with English menus attached, photos, and complete details. We currently have ~50 entries and it’s constantly growing. You can either find new venues for you to visit or you can share your favorite venues with others. What’s even more fun, is that you can vote on venues you like, and that will show up on the top venues list.
• The NCKU how-to guides includes a few guides written by INCKU community members on how to do things in NCKU. Whether it’s how to use the NCKU iTeach system, how to set up your computer at your dorm, or what insurance is available if you don’t have NHI – if you wrote it in INCKU once, it will be added to the guides section to help others.
• Forums are there for general discussions about NCKU, Tainan or Taiwan, as well as English based news about what’s happening in NCKU from NCKU’s Executive VP and other university resources.
• Classified ads are about helping you to look for things or people in Tainan. It’s got sections like housing, work, meeting people, buying and selling. Right now there are ~40 ads, the biggest ad-section being Taiwanese looking for a language/culture exchange partner.
• Events includes an event calendar with some of the events that are happening in NCKU and Tainan. Post your own event to notify others or look for interesting events happening near you.
• Groups is by far the most powerful community feature in INCKU. Resembling the Facebook groups, anyone can open a group in their interest-topic, invite other members and share group related discussions, files, events and links. A group can be open to all, moderated or invite-only, based on your privacy preferences. This could be a great tool for a team to work together, a student club/organization, or for students/TAs attending a specific course. There are currently over 30 groups, public and private, sharing information and collaborating on their group-topic.

Other features include notifications to get regular automatic updates on what’s happening, an in-site messaging system, photo uploads, links, a site-wide chat, blogging to share your experiences and much more.

To enjoy what INCKU has to offer you all you have to do is visit. Most features are open and available to anonymous users, but to really get the most of INCKU we suggest that you quickly sign up to register with a username. That will open up all the site features for you to use.

If you wish to become active in the community – we’ll highly appreciate that. Any contribution that you can make to any section on the site will be very welcomed. This site is about the community and so all information on it is from their member participation. We keep track of the users contributing to the site with site-points and we hope that we would be able to give a little back to those special people in the future.

The most important thing for us to say is that this community is about you and what you want or need. Most of the site features are features that we implemented based on member requests and so we encourage you to say what you think in our support forums - request what you think is missing, help us correct what you think is wrong. The community effort is what will make this succeed.

The website address is simply : http://www.incku.com . We hope to see you come and take part in the community.

Wishing you a happy Chinese new year. Yours truly,

The INCKU team

If you like stats, then there are some INCKU stats available for you to look at. Overall, it’s okay for a new site that’s been running for only about 4 months. The real success would be when I will hear that this site has really helped people living and studying here.

After about a month or two that this has been running I’ve received the flattering news that there are two similar projects in the works to make something similar but with a more commercial direction, realizing that maybe there is potential for English language based information and advertising in Tainan. That goes along with the rise of English language guides and magazine in Tainan - Taiwan-Fun recently releasing a Tainan version to match the already established Tainan-based Rickshaw. With 1000+ international students expected next year in NCKU, I would say the international presence in Tainan is on an up-trend. Anything to help us feel more comfortable here would be a great contribution.