Enterprising students create MiddBay.com Web site offers new, private platform for exchanging products and services

Author: Liya Gao

Inspired by Web sites such as Craigslist.org and eBay.com, two Middlebury students have devised a new way to serve the Middlebury College community. Overnight, www.middbay.com, a nonprofit student initiative to provide the Middlebury community (students, faculty and staff) with a private platform to exchange services and goods has been born.

Hiba Fakhoury '09, Student Government Association (SGA) Chief of Staff and Issaq Sadaqah '11, head of public relations for the SGA, first came up with the idea to start a similar Web site earlier this year. The idea, combined with backing from the SGA Finance Committee to purchase the domain and space and support from the SGA and Community Council, soon made MiddBay.com a reality.

The site, which impressively took Fakhoury and Sadaqah a mere three weeks to complete, is now up and running. An improvement from Sadaqah's previous www.middbook.com, which only listed textbooks, MiddBay.com incorporates much more. MiddBay.com has only been functional for about a week and contains four main components. Students can go to MiddBay.com to list and buy textbooks as well as compare textbook prices via ISBN.

"The goal of this function is to help students save money because I don't think it is right for the bookstore to make money off of textbooks when they are mandatory for every student," said Sadaqah. Students can also list and buy furniture and bikes on the site, a function that was added to make it more convenient for students living off-campus. The final component of the Web site is a Middlebury ride-sharing program that students can turn to for alternative transportation.

"The SGA does provide buses to New York and Boston during the holidays, but they fill up quickly; Middbay is there to help students get to where they need to go when that happens," said Sadaqah.

While these are the only functions of the site for now, the idea is still developing and both Fakhoury and Sadaqah hope to add more to it in the future. Currently, there is room on the site for clubs and organizations on campus to freely advertise their events.

"We are also hoping to expand the project to include faculty and staff and other areas after assessing the feedback of the student body. However, as of now I believe that we have tried to incorporate all the features that would be helpful to the student body," said Fakhoury.