S tudent government doesn’t attract very many computer programmers, but student body presidents tend to include difficult tech points in their platforms.
Nobody expects an up-and-coming politician to correctly estimate the time or resources needed for these, and it is routine and expected that many points of an SBP platform will not come to fruition — certain projects are not as important as representing the student body to administrators. UNC Student Body President Andrew Powell’s platform is an ambitious one, especially in the realm of technology. How likely is it that these points will come to fruition in some form or another?
Powell proposed a computer science information technology internship course. Briefly stated, Stanford has a course where computer science majors intern with their IT department, and Powell’s platform states UNC should have one as well.
At UNC, a few student coders work independently with Information Technology Services because these students created their own useful tech projects and ITS became involved later. ITS wants and will pay for student talent. But routine coursework risks flooding it with unnecessary or unfocused labor, and the faculty of the computer science department wouldn’t take a student-government-proposed course seriously. I doubt that this will become accredited.
A straightforward, paid summer internship with ITS for a few students may be a more feasible and beneficial model.
Powell’s platform also said he would explore a transition from Microsoft Tools (Outlook) to Google Tools (Gmail).
The problem here is motivation. There’s really no compelling reason for this change. Microsoft has its problems, and moving to Gmail may be nice, but Heelmail is still decent. No one is so inconvenienced by Microsoft Live that ITS should go to Gmail — it’s a drastic and costly solution for a not-really-existent problem.
Powell also said he would implement a ConnectCarolina Application Programming Interface (API) integration. APIs let developers make things with a company’s technology. Google APIs let other websites read from Google Calendars, and ConnectCarolina APIs would help student developers.
There are ways to make this happen, but it requires a lot of custom back-end work. Carolina Class Master uses an API that senior computer science major Winston Howes created from scratch. UNC Class Finder parses public information from the Registrar’s PDFs, and this could easily be made into an API. If student government wanted to partner up with these students, they might be able to help out with administrative aspects.
