Project: IAmLightBlue
Project Coordinator: Reuben Doetsch – rmd2153@columbia.edu
This document outlines a proposal for the planned technology portal, IAmLightBlue.com. The portal will provide information and resources about Columbia and the wider community It will be geared initially towards the undergraduate student population. The purpose of the portal is to enhance student life by providing a more elegant online user experience.
What is a portal?
A portal exists as a site that aggregates information in a digestible,informative, and potentially customizable way. Examples of a web portals are MSN, Yahoo!, AOL and iGoogle.
Why would it be overly challenging for CUIT to create the portal?
While CUIT has the knowledge and expertise to build a student portal, it has a shortage in: a.) time, b.) money, c.) flexibility. The third constraint, flexibility, seems to be the largest challenge that hinders CUIT from implementing a successful and agile web portal. Understandably, Columbia does not wish to host a columbia.edu website without full control of the content. Thus, independently generated content such as that published on Bwog, Culpa, Spectator, CUeats, etc. cannot be incorporated, since it is outside of university jurisdiction. In order for the portal to be a central hub for a majority of student culture and activity, it would have to include these highly popular, albeit unofficial and unendorsed, sites. Even if time and money were abundant resources, this third constraint of flexibility would prevent the portal from being robust enough to meet student needs.
What is the purpose of this Columbia website?
Our plan is to make the most useful Columbia-centric web portal for our undergraduate student body. Our goal is to have this site be the homepage for a significant majority of Columbia undergraduates, and potentially for all university students down the road. If students need anything related to student life at Columbia, then this is the place to go. Some examples of modules featured on the portal include those created for Culpa, CuEats, Bwog, Spec, etc..
How can Student Development lead to most efficient and effective delivery?
The proposed solution strongly recommends that students develop the site. Student developers require no or minimal labor cost. There is a larger supply of student developers who are able to commit to such a project than there are CUIT staff members. Further, this is the type of hands-on technology project that student developers seek as a way to grow their professional portfolio. Designing, building, and iteratively enhancing the student portal would be invaluable experience. Finally, a student development team offers the portal agility as they can make decisions quickly without having to vet each of these through organizational layers. While each year will likely bring new student developers to the team, we can still ensure great stability by bringing on more members each year and making sure knowledge transfer occurs between veteran team members and new members. For student developers, the opportunity to work on a project where they are empowered to make decisions and where their work is appreciated and utilized by a broad swath of students is certainly a most rewarding one. It is a win-win situation.
How Will We Choose and Monitor Students for the Project?
We envision the student portal to be an open source project. An open source project is one where everyone can see and edit the code. A governing body of experienced student developers will be able to accept or reject changes made to the portal. This means that anyone who wants to learn the Framework can jump around the site and start creating content and experimenting with the structure.
Goals for the Technology Portal
1. To help fulfill a need for a centralized repository of data and currently disjoint websites for the undergraduate student body
2. To help teach students about software development through hands-on experience
From a tech perspective…
Either we can use a premade CMS (Drupal, WordPress) or we can roll out our own CMS. CMS stands for Content Management System, a way to publish content online. Rolling out our own CMS means that we would code the whole system and not use some of the premade features of a Content Management System. For a few reasons, I have chosen the second option, namely to roll out our own.
Rolling out our own platform not only gives our student developers a broader exposure to up and coming technologies. We also are then not at the mercy of the CMS we are using. Many times when CMS’s update themselves, plugins and features break. Instead of constricting ourselves to a certain software architecture and framework, we can create our own framework. This presents both an opportunity to learn more about the inner working of much the web centric technology, and also gives me the flexibility needed to do some of the things we conceive of doing.
Now comes the best part… money and the low amount needed!
What needs to be funded and how do we need to use money? We need to use money to fund the server space which should be at most 75 dollars a month at max. This encompasses both a student portal and potentially the CCSC website. This or we could find pledges from student developers (much as Culpa is hosted). We can discuss this later as the test site and the other site can be hosted on my web account.
In contrast, developing just the first release of the student portal through CUIT would have consumed $30,000 of the student life fees collected by CCSC.
[Only if you understand web technology should you continue]
What technology will we use…
The technology we will use will be Ruby with either a Rails or Sinatra framework. I have selected Ruby because it is a.) an up-and-coming technology, b.) a beautiful programming language, c.) a great teaching tool, d.) and, admittedly, out of personal bias. This section will be expanded as more is written.
