We presented our work in Dragon Den Pitch on Friday 20 May. It took around 10 minutes with some questions.

Some students ask us about the project. One of them asked how it is possible to work with this system prior to student’s arrival to university. The answer is students can register for university email address once they firmly have accepted their offer and they have been allocated an ID Card Number.

Another question was about how it is possible to work with this system after graduation. The answer is after graduation, students still have access to their university email address as they are alumni.

The panel also asked some questions about the project as they claimed the university is implementing the same system. The university already has a lot of system such as SUSSED, eFolio, and other sub systems. However the important thing is that students should know about them, know how to work with them, and are happy working with them.

Another panel member asked us about the different between our project and Facebook. We have compared these two systems and published the work in this blog. Furthermore I answered that there are some similarities between our system and Facebook specially in friendship, creating groups and events. However our system is designed specially for students of the University of Southampton considering their issues. Furthermore we have considered Academic Aspects as well and it is defined in our vision that we want to improve students’ studies as well.

This document will record our work plan for this project.

This work plan will act as a guiding document for the activities to be carried out and also as a convincing document for approval of decision makers.

The user interface acts as an important factor in every applications and websites specially in SNS which varieties of people use it. Assistive Technologies help developers to design and developer an accessible webiste for everyone specially taking disabled or impairment users into mind.

We considered this principle in our design and tried to design a website both east and accessible to everyone.

1. Browser Compatibility: We have tested our system in Linux and Windows in different Web Browsers such as Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 11, and Firefox 4 with no compatibility issues.
2. W3C: We evaluated our system design by W3C CSS and Markup validator and solved compatibility issues.
3. Tableless: Our system has been developed in tableless approach, with div, and CSS.

Based on Web2Access – JISC TechDis

1	Login, Sign up, and Other forms Accessible		Account is necessary Simple form, no labled No CAPTCHA Can use keyboard tabbing Form label missing No problme in WebbIE
2	Image ALT Attributes		No ALT attribute for most images Checked with Web Developer

Team BASK LOGO

For our presentation, we decided to use prezi web-based application:

For the first phase of our project development, we excluded the connectivity of our SNS to other SNS. However based on our project vision, this is defined in our plan.

• By use of Facebook API, we would like to bridge our SNS to Facebook allowing students to find their Facebook friends in SOTON Student Connect system. Also, we would like SOTON Student Connect users to be able to post their activities in our system in Facebook system.
• We would like to connect our system to Twitter allowing users to interact more with their friends.
• We also want to connect our system to some other RSS and news server in order to import relevant news for users.

If we had enough permission from the University of Southampton, we could connect our system to resources of university such as iSolution or SUSSED. In this Mashup, we could also import notes of all modules to academic section of our website providing an area for user to put their own personal notes on course materials and allowing other students to see those notes and interact more. At first, this was our vision. However we noticed that this is not possible.

First of all, we considered MVC architecture in our system. View layer is separated from logic layer and we have a complete separate POJO classes to model the domain. Furthermore we have a database controller in order to connect to the database.

For our database, we decided to choose MySQL Server as it is both easy and powerful database server. It integrates well with Java, our programming language, and performs very well on web-based systems.

We choose Java for our programming language. The reason of choice is that we have portability defined in our non-functional requirements so we did not want our system to be depended to an operating system. Java has a lot of resources and as the team members were familiar with Java, we did not have any problem in this aspect.

For our view layer, we have chosen HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Our UI is easy and strait-forward as we thought a good SNS should indeed have a simple and quick UI. We developed three prototypes and we asked our friends to comment on them. We chose one of them based on feedbacks and designed one of them. After implementation was done, we applied the UI design to our system.

A student would like to ask a question about a topic of one of his modules he is studying in this semester. Easily, he can login into the system and navigate to academic section. In this section, he can register his field of study and all modules he is studying in this semester. Then he can create a module thread for a question. I this module thread, he can ask a question and wait for other students to respond. Other students can find this question by searching or navigating to all available module threads, find this question, and answer it. Students also have the opportunity to add this module to their interests so they get updates whenever there is an activity in that module.

Once a person is offered a place to study and he/she accepts that offer, he/she is able to register for university email address and apply for accommodation. However the choice of accommodation is very frustrating as it is going to be his/her accommodation for one-year.

The problem is that there is not enough information about accommodation on the University website making it a little harder to find a suitable accommodation.

In our proposed system, students login and then navigate to accommodation area. They can see all accommodation, reviews of them, rankings of them, and a photo gallery consisting a lot of photos. All of these features have been provided by university students. Furthermore they have the opportunity to talk to students and find more information.

After they have registered for an accommodation, they can register their information into the system, and our proposed system will recommend friends who are actually their flatmate. So, even prior to their arrivals, they have the opportunity to know their flatmates better and get prepared.