Student government upgrades Web portals

With ASPSU elections wrapping up earlier this week, the focus now shifts to the incoming student government administration. To aid in this transition, ASPSU is hard at work on a few new technology projects in hopes of bringing student government up to speed.

First, a new institutional memory wiki will provide a resource for student government members to keep track of their experiences. The wiki will serve as a kind of journal, allowing ASPSU staffers to note successes, failures and tips for future members, explained ASPSU Communications Director Spencer Potter.

“It’s not that previous student governments haven’t done that, but that it has been a binder with pieces of paper,” Potter said of creating an institutional memory portal.

While the wiki will be accessible only to ASPSU members, Potter said there are a few important features of the new system. In particular, he pointed to its accessibility, searching potential and cross-referencing ability.

The programmer behind the project, ASPSU Administrative Director Ed Hallman, spoke of the project with the clear goal of improving the effectiveness of student government on all fronts.

Hallman hopes that ASPSU will use it to create a living history of everything that a student government administration works on throughout the year.

“Every position in ASPSU in all of the branches, all of the organizations and all of the events and activities will be listed off,” he said. “It will record basically all the collective knowledge of ASPSU.”

While the wiki is by no means “secret,” it will not be freely available online because it is mostly an internal resource, Hallman said. He hopes that the coming upgrades to the ASPSU Web site will serve to increase student outreach and involvement instead.

Not only will the new and improved Web site have some content from the institutional memory wiki that might interest students, but it will also have forums to cultivate discussion, feedback and an exchange of ideas between the student body at large and the members of student government.

The Web site is undergoing graphical and user interface upgrades that Hallman said should make it easier to use and maintain.

Hallman pointed to the RatePSU Web site, which fell apart this year because of mismanagement, as proof that the upgrades were necessary.

“We didn’t know who was actually hosting the site, who was paying for it. It got hacked to death and there was no log or instruction set to make sense of it,” Hallman said.

He also mentioned that funds had been allocated for a webmaster position in next year’s ASPSU budget. The webmaster will have primary responsibility for maintaining the upgraded site and supervising additions and maintenance of the wiki.

While the wiki has been open to new content for a few weeks and should be fully functional by the end of the term, the new ASPSU Web site may take slightly longer.

While an exact date for the launch of the new ASPSU Web site has yet to be established, Hallman said that once finished the incoming administration will be able to take complete advantage of the new resource at their disposal.