‘HSE Family’ Social Network Helps You Find Your Friends, Vote and Organise Events

HSE Family is a new social networking website in Russian and English for graduates, students and teachers on all HSE campuses. 

History

In the mid 2000s HSE graduates made a first attempt at creating a secure database of their contact details, accessible only to themselves. In those days the university was relatively small and the database fitted onto an Excel spreadsheet. Later, the Centre for Alumni created the first prototype of the site for HSE graduates.

However in the process they discovered that lots of students and professors wanted to be included into the exclusive network. So the idea of a website for graduates grew into a much bigger project - HSE Family.

The website underwent a baptism of fire in September during the student project elections with more than a thousand people voting. In this way you can’t inflate the figures because every authorised user can only vote once (behold an instrument of direct democracy!)

If necessary, elections to the student council for example could be conducted on the website without any worries about ballot-rigging.

It’s worth mentioning that leading international universities have been using expensive computer programmes and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on maintaining and updating the contact details of their graduates.

Now the website allows you to search for students and graduates, you can register for the HSE Alumni Awards ceremony. In the coming weeks, new services will appear for graduates and students and graduates of additional professional education programmes. Foreign students and post-grads will be able to use the website too. 

Possibilities

HSE Family allows you to:

• Search for students and graduates;
• Subscribe to events at HSE;
• Take part in surveys and university elections;
• Receive gifts and discounts from HSE partners;
• Search and advertise vacancies (from 1st December);
• Apply for grants and competitions (opens in December/January).

Only students, alumni and teachers are allowed to register on HSE Family so that information doesn’t fall into the hands of outsiders.

To become one of us on the website you can use:

• your HSE email;
• the number on your diploma;
• your mobile phone number.

You must sign the user agreement and accept the terms of this private club.

Organising events

HSE Family has a convenient service for university staff to create and manage events (conferences, master classes, lectures, etc.). You no longer have to register through external resources or apply by email or phone. Authorised users can subscribe to the Events service on the HSE Family website with one-click, sign up for interesting events and peruse our events calendar.

Outside users can also subscribe to our events. An event initiator can manage a list of users, see who has subscribed to it and most important of all the university will have the opportunity to update its contact list for alumni.

If you want to use the service to create events, send an email from your company email to family@hse.ru  You will be given rights to create events pages.

If you have difficulty registering or find some problems with the workings of the HSE Family website, please be patient and tell us about it by writing to family@hse.ru

The Centre for Alumni would like to thank SKY Corporation and in particular Alexei Volkov for their help in creating the HSE Family website.