Many colleges and academic programs undergo recurring accreditation. In this process, documents and information about the college or program must be collected from all of the units within the college, collocated, and shared with the accreditation committee in a timely manner. This presents several challenges. Many of the documents involved contain confidential material. In addition, collecting the documentation can be very time-consuming in a large college. Third, collocating documents in a place where many staff people have access can involve the risk of accidental deletions or faulty editing. My project involved building a SharePoint site to facilitate the AACSB accreditation process for the College of Business at University of Wyoming. SharePoint is an ideal tool for accreditation because it is secure, provides version control for recovery of lost or damaged items, and offers robust permissions control. For these reasons, this project has a broad application to other accredited institutions.

Most people have extra items, such as textbooks and video games, sitting on their shelves. They may only use them occasionally, but their friends and family could benefit from them. Collaborative consumption - sharing items among groups instead of buying them individually - empowers people to save money and reduce their ecological footprint. While several solutions exist for collaborative consumption, none combine an intuitive interface with a network of trusted friends and family. We are introducing Shelf, a Web application that facilitates the borrowing and lending of physical items amongst peers. Shelf integrates with social circles to leverage existing trust relationships while encouraging viral spread. We have also made security and accountability a primary concern, rewarding users who safely return items and penalizing those who do not. Our user-oriented approach incorporates extensive research and thorough planning to create a useful and relevant solution. Check us out at dontbeshelfish.com.

SmartAdventure addresses the problem that students’ test scores in the United States has remained stagnate for the past decade. This has been attributed partially to the fact the students aren’t learning subject foundations in primary school where the classrooms are too large and students don’t receive individualized attention. To address this issue we designed and built a prototype for an educational web application called SmartAdventure. SmartAdventure provides students with immediate feedback, tracks progress for individualized learning, and shows students and teachers where a student is excelling and needs improvement. SmartAdventure is a solution that allows students to learn at their own pace and allows teachers to easily identify students that require additional attention.

First Steps Preschool Infant Teachers are responsible for recording accurate and detailed information on paper charts while caring for infants in the Infant Room. One to two teachers care for five to eight infants from 7am until 6pm, Monday through Friday. Teachers dedicate over 60 minutes a day to recording and sharing with parents the activities and behaviors involving the daily health, habits, and significant developments of the infants. This all must be done while performing a variety of tasks such as feeding, changing, rocking, coddling, playing with, and/or holding one or more infants. A charting application on a mobile device in the Infant Room will allow the teachers more time to care for the infants rather than having to additionally juggle clipboards, paper, pens and other objects. Time needed for charting and verbal reports will be reduced while time available for caring for the infants will be increased.

Online free-speech is under attack: over 50% of internet users live in countries with medium to high levels of censorship. Legislation like SOPA, PIPA, and the upcoming Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) treaty are all attempts at forcing internet blacklists on the free world. Speech.is provides interoperability between a special censorship resistant top-level-domain name, ‘.bit’, and the rest of the web. A ‘.bit’ domain name is a lot like a ‘.com’ or ‘.net’ domain name except that no government can take control of it. Speech.is makes it possible for anyone to surf websites on the censorship resistant Namecoin domain-name-system using their regular web browser, without any add-ons and without changing any system settings. Speech.is provides a safe haven for internet users on the web, where governments cannot seize domain names nor selectively censor websites. Speech.is effectively neuters the censorship provisions of the TPP and represents a major blow against censorship and big step forward for the web.

The National Runaway Switchboard estimates that on any given night there are approximately 1.3 million homeless youth living unsupervised on the streets, in abandoned buildings, with friends or with strangers. At the same time, general statistical software is usually unaffordable for non-profit youth caring organizations. Finally, lack of person-focused statistics makes it hard to provide person-focused caring. The SYM reporting system was developed to help Street Youth Ministries by providing an overall view of activities, generating impact reports to sponsors, and detecting the young people who need immediate care, thus hugely improving the efficiency of resource allocation.

The power of ideas unleashes when ideas spread. TEDxRainier is devoted to making a difference by gathering thinkers and spreading ideas. Active communities built around ideas will be a great addition to the existing annual event, to help ideas spread further. However, it is hard to maintain such communities with limited resources. This companion app we designed helps facilitate community building by leveraging the power of Twitter hashtags. We are focusing on solving the problem and making this app simple and easy to use.

The International Medicine Clinic at Harborview offers primary care to adult refugees and immigrants. Patients typically originate from Southeast Asia or East Africa, and many have complex medical conditions, are accustomed to non-Western medicine, and do not have complete health records. In order to help community doctors to treat refugees and immigrants, the International Clinic developed a toolkit to provide tips on accessing patients’ medical information and suggestions for treatment and health screening. Our project is to build an interactive web application with more thorough references and recommendations based on the toolkit.

What are people saying about the library? The Seattle Public Library engages patrons in a variety of ways and encourages people to comment on library services. Due to the volume and various channels of incoming comments, it is hard for library staff and leadership to manually manage comments. To solve this problem, our team created the Canary Comment Management System. This is a new, stand-alone, centralized system to collect, store, manage, and share comments. Through features such as tagging, searching, and reporting, our system gives a fuller picture of when comments happen, where they come from, how frequently they happen, and what they are about. For leadership, it will help the Library identify issues and trends, and guide decision making. For staff, it will improve timeliness, accountability, and collaboration. For the organization, our solution represents a more efficient way to manage public resources to help the community. 

My capstone focused on the preservation, arrangement, and description of photographs made by Dolores Varela Phillips, documenting the 1970 conflict between two tribes, Nisqually and Puyallup, and Washington state law enforcement. Results include EAD finding aid and digital access to the collection. These images shed light on a critical period of national and local civil-rights history. Phillips’ collection is comprised of negatives she hid in her purse lining to prevent confiscation by the police. The photographs capture an important event that was the catalyst to a revision in Washington state  laws. Negative collections are distinctive and a time-consuming variation from standard processing. This often hinders valuable materials from reaching the public; a mounting information problem archives face. Raising awareness about the significance of this rare collection is paramount as 2014 marked the 40th anniversary of the new law passing. Already, these images have received user-requests for a Smithsonian exhibit.