Quicklook: RIT Student Government Goes Open-Source
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Quicklook: RIT Student Government Goes Open-Source
The Rochester Institute of Technology’s Student Government (SG) is another member of the FLOSS community!
About Student Government
RIT Student Government (SG), one of the university’s shared governance groups, advocates on behalf of the undergraduates and graduates, serving as a liaison between the students, faculty, staff, and administration.
Student Government’s mission often births technology services that members of its Technology Committee develop in attempts to solve problems that students on campus may have.
Student Government <3’s Open Source
Student Government embraces open source development and is self-described as, “[a] new entrant into the Free and Open Source Software community.” Student organizations that embrace and support FLOSS can help maintain platforms that continue to be robust over a long period of time - the services that Student Government provides are, by proxy, funded by the university, increasing the likelihood that they will continue to exist for years to come.
Projects and Services
Student Government has an official GitHub organization comprised of their project’s repositories. You can check out the full list of SG services here.
PawPrints
Built in Python, PawPrints is Student Government’s petition application for the RIT community. The petition suite itself is spun up in a Docker container and can be hosted on a machine that has Docker and Docker Compose set up properly.
PawPrints is licensed under the Apache License 2.0.
Naps
Built atop Meteor, an open source platform for building JavaScripts applications, is the Naps system - a map of all the napping spots on campus!
Naps is licensed under the MIT License.
BikeShare
Student Government has open sourced the software backing the BikeShare program. The software is intended to aid in the maintenance of bikes, legal compliance, user management, and the checkout of bikes. The platform was developed using ASP.NET MVC, with a MSSQL database under the hood for data persistence and usage of Twitter Bootstrap for styling.
BikeShare’s website is licensed under the MIT License.
Fork SG Today!
If you’re interested in developing your own applications based off of these projects, feel free to visit their GitHub organization!