Every institution is prone to problems. IIT Kanpur is no different – with such a large student population, maintaining an updatable database of almost any information is a tough task. Providing proper access to all of this information is also difficult. But there are a few people among us who have recognized such problems, treated them as challenges, and come up with logical and implementable solutions to aid the student community. These new initiatives will have a good role to play in making more and more information easily accessible to the junta and improving standards of student life in the campus.
ShareIITK:
The need for a central platform to find all academic material available with the students inspired the idea of ShareIITK. Share is an online portal where students can upload exam papers, quizzes, their solutions, e-books, notes and almost any other academic stuff for the whole campus community to access and enjoy the benefits of. In the words of Bhanu Pratap Singh Tanwar (one of the initiators), “accompanied by effective search and tagging, Share IITK is basically a step towards a customized exam preparation portal.”
If you ever get stuck before an exam, and can’t find your assignment sheet, Share is the place to go. You shouldn’t be heading toward a photocopy shop or a friend likely to have it. That is the dream of the team behind Share.
Share was conceptualized and implemented by Bhanu, Samarth and Romit. Contributions have come from students of different batches, pertaining to different courses. Still, this initiative requires support and widespread usage from the campus junta to make it the ideal place to go to, before exams. The full purpose of Share will be realized only when more people contribute stuff and suggest improvements.
Link: http://share-iitk.herokuapp.com/
Saner OARS
This is the brainchild of Jayesh, and implemented by him and Srijan. As the name suggests, Saner OARS is an attempt to simplify OARS for the students. According to Jayesh, “OARS has many problems – design, user interface, uses outdated technology (ASP code + oracle DBMS), it can only run properly on Internet Explorer, and many more.” Saner OARS tries to fix some of these problems and make the user experience better.
Right now, one can search for courses at Saner OARS, and find out the instructor, class hours and credits for each course. The founders hope to introduce many other features to the service, including, but not limited to, selecting choices, making sure they don’t clash, including course and instructor reviews, displaying the popularity of the course across different batches etc.
Saner OARS is a very progressive attempt at improving old services of the institute, but it also requires inputs from interested students to make it even better. It is open source, so anyone with ideas can edit the source code and contribute to it. All source code is available at navya.github.com – a group of all the open source developers at IITK.
Link: navya.github.io/oars/
Lost and Found
The lost and found portal has been designed by Sohil Bansal. It is a very simple online implementation of a Lost and Found bulletin board, where all complaints of lost items and info about the items found can be posted, viewed and replied to. In the words of Sohil, “Whenever something is lost or is found, only two people are involved, so why bother everyone else? This dilutes the importance of significant messages.”
The countless mails that were being sent to the student community by the DOSA (forwarded by others, of course) for lost items were a constant nuisance for everyone, and apparently this was the reason that prompted the creation of Lost and Found (LnF).
The major problems faced by Sohil and others in taking this ingenious step were vastly the result of lack of cooperation by the administration. They contacted the relevant authorities, but were sent here and there without their problems being sorted. There are a large number of found items at the SIS office, but the officers are uninterested in uploading their details on the portal. Sohil feels that the users are taking advantage of the portal, but for it to fully serve its purpose, support from the administration is a must.
Link: http://students.iitk.ac.in/lnf/
Other efforts
Apart from the above mentioned initiatives taken by the students, there have been various other efforts too, whose results are either in place, or are soon going to come.
Hall Automation System was initiated by Sohil, and has the potential to automate almost all aspects of a student’s residential life. This includes mess bill, canteen bill, room status – all the details of each and every student stored at a single place for effective use. But, this system hasn’t been implemented since the last one year, due to lack of interest shown by the administration. The Hall offices are also lazy about providing the data.
There’s also a website giving all the details regarding movie and match screenings at the OAT, which hasn’t been functional since the last couple of months. It was developed by Sohil. It is again an innovative way to avoid junk mails, and make things systematic at the same time. This concept can be scaled up to the whole Gymkhana’s activities, by possibly uploading all the upcoming events on a calendar.
These are a few instances of individual attempts to solve daily problems in campus. Being members of this community, we should contribute to these initiatives and spread the word. We should also try and find solutions to many other problems in campus to improve the way we live, study and participate in activities. After all, a small step here is the beginning of being a responsible citizen to the nation.
Support from the campus junta is the most important ingredient for the success of any of these works, so any conceptual, technical or content based help will be appreciated. According to Jayesh, such initiatives can be taken up by students as summer projects. A small chunk of time and effort from our lives can help us and the student community of IITK at large for years to come.
Written by Nishit Asnani
