Calendar App Ventfull Shuts Down

A mobile calendar application that last year’s Undergraduate Council leaders lauded and funded— even as some representatives questioned its efficacy has powered down.

Ventfull, which had been available at Harvard for the past two semesters, recently shut down, according to Brown undergraduate Joseph Stein, a co-founder of the application.

“The effort we were putting into maintaining it and bringing in new customers was disproportionate for the amount of money we were making from it,” Stein said.

UC President and Vice President Shaiba Rather ‘17 and Danny Banks ‘17 preside over Sunday night’s Undergraduate Council Meeting. By Sidni M. Frederick

The application, initially released in February 2014 by Stein and then-Brown undergraduate Peter Simpson, aggregates on-campus events and displays them in a calendar format. Former UC President Ava Nasrollahzadeh ’16 and Vice President Dhruv P. Goyal ’16 introduced the application to Harvard in 2015. Frequently praising Ventfull during their presidential campaign, Nasrollahzadeh and Goyal said the program would mitigate the “fear of missing out” among college students.

As the UC continued to fund the calendar application throughout last year, many representatives criticized what they deemed a failing and underutilized program. Newly elected UC President Shaiba Rather ’17 and Vice President Daniel V. Banks ’17 updated the representatives on the future of Ventfull at the first Council-wide meeting of the semester.

“Our Ventfull partnership is off,” Rather said to applause from several UC representatives.

Ventfull’s termination followed unsuccessful negotiations between UC leaders and the application’s developers over Harvard's potential purchase of the program.The groups ultimately forwent any deal after they reached an impasse in gaining access to Ventfull’s code base, Goyal said.

“There were certain things that we wanted to do that the current code wouldn't let us do. Having access to that code would give us the flexibility to tailor Ventfull towards the needs of the Harvard campus,” Goyal said. “They were willing to sell the application, but we were not willing to buy it unless we had the ability to vet the code and study it.”

When Ventfull declined the UC's request to vet the code prior to purchase, the UC backed out of negotiations, Goyal said.

“The impasse in the negotiations is a matter of life, and we just had to deal with it,” Goyal said.

Since its launch last February, the application was met with mixed reviews from Council representatives, who initially voted to spend $1,200 for a one-semester trial period. The UC continued to fund Ventfull out of the Council’s operations budget last summer. More than 2,700 students had signed up for the application, Goyal said.

Most recently, the UC voted 26-14 in December to spend another $1,200 to fund Ventfull for a third semester. That transaction will not take place, according to Goyal.

Last December, many UC representatives criticized the application, which they characterized as a failed program. An April report by the UC’s Student Relations Committee states that “while the idea of Ventfull was good in intention, there was general agreement that it was not being used by the campus.” The report recommended that the Council consider a “free alternative that is already widely used,” such as Google Calendar.

Some representatives who had voted against funding the application last semester praised the program’s termination.

“I’m very glad that it’s dead,” UC representative Oliver W. Kim ’16, an inactive Crimson editor, said. “It was a waste of students’ money, it was used by nobody, and it was a drain on the UC’s time and effort.”

An update to Omni, a separate Harvard application that aggregates student resources, removed Ventfull from its features last Tuesday. UC representatives will discuss potential alternatives to the calendar application in the coming weeks, Rather said.

–Staff writer Brian P. Yu can be reached at brian.yu@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @brianyu28.