It has been a long time since I blogged, I had been really busy with developing websites & web-applications for my institute to pay back a little with my knowledge & skills.
When I was in second year I had a plan to computerize our Student Activity Centre (SAC) elections. For those of you who dont know what is SAC, SAC is a place where student activities are carried out, it is the hub managed by the students for the students. SAC is divided into four societies: Technical, Cultural, Games & Sports and Film & Music. Each of these societies are headed by student elected representatives. The election process till now was manual process involving paper and tedious counting. I had suggested our Director in my second year to computerize it but he didn’t give much heed to it but all of the sudden in the end of my final year, I got a call from one of his sub-ordinates to work on the computerization process just two weeks before the scheduled SAC elections. I took the task even though he asked it to be specifically be built in ASP.NET and I am not much familiar with it but taking it as a challenge, I accepted it, thinking that there were many guys proficient in ASP.NET and they would be happy to help but I didn’t take into the equation that these people were not idle but working, and infact these people were not working they were working too hard 2-3 projects per person with deadlines of just weeks. So assembling the team became a huge issue, to overcome it I tried to convince them to at least help, Shrinivas was contacted and he immediately agreed to help, I took a second year guy Yashvir Rana who knew little ASP.NET but had no experience so with Shrinivas’s support and guidance we were able to code the system. The only thing I contributed to the team was the System Design & Database. All the hectic coding was done by these people. Bala Krishna helped us make the web-application look attractive. The web-application took around 10-15 sleepless days & nights and the site was complete just 12 hours before the elections. We without taking a break deployed it on the server and looked into the security measures so as it couldn’t be hacked and tampered by students. All was doubly verified before we took a sigh of relief. We took the rest for the first time in two weeks and it felt really good. We woke the next day, The “SAC Election Day”, this was the most important day for us as it would determine what our time spent was worth. The election day went fine, students came and voted with a minor incident where we had to call on for re-voting of 10 voters because of incorrect candidate list being uploaded by the authority. The elections in all went fine and the process was shortened from 18 man-power & 28 man-hours to just 10 man-power (just volunteers & security to manage & register students) & 7 man-hours. Our Director congratulated us on the great job done and called it a success. This I would say is the final project as a B.Tech student. Though I had many more ideas to change how things work around me but lets leave it to others to do. I have already told director about them to the director and my vision. Anyone interested can contact me or Director sir.
Comments on: "Computerization of SAC Elections" (4)
Nice idea… though, more counters could have helped the cause… And, it would be better, if we could vote from our rooms…
@Qanit:
Thanks for ur suggestion. We couldn’t allow more counters because we didnt believe that network would be handle that much but I was proven wrong as this system used much less resources and 3 more labs (3×50 systems) could be added to make the system much more efficient. We have already discussed it with the director and it would be implemented next year.
Regarding voting from the room. The basic aim behind having elections is for the students to anonymously give their preference freely. Since voting from room in some cases may lead to loss of this freedom to choose candidates freely (as the candidate or his representative may compel you to vote according to him/her). Hence voting from room will not be possible.
Next year there will be biometric systems setup to check identity and the voting process will be faster. Our Institute is going Hi-Tech next year.
Nicely put sir, well you couldve included the climax moments like when we made the system work 5 min bfore the director’s deadline hehe
That was really a the climax in our movie or rather call it “Comedy of Errors”. We try to fix one thing other thing fails we fix the other, a new error pops up. We had no idea of what the heck was happening and the deadline just 7 minutes away for web-application completion was giving us goosebumps. We don’t know how things suddenly came together and it surprisingly started working just 5mins to the deadline.