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Daniel Hoelbling-Inzko talks about programming

imagineClub – Students for Students

Posted by Daniel Hölbling on June 21, 2009

In Austria every university has a institution called ÖH that is there to support students throughout their studies. They provide legal advice, course material and many other things.
The downside of this great service is that it’s directly associated with the university and therefore subject to some regulations regarding what they can do and what not.

Amongst the things that the regular ÖH isn’t able to do is provide course material other than the official things the professors provide. Student generated content could be wrong and that would look bad for the organization.
imagineClub was founded to solve this problem in 2007 and had a lot of success by requiring members to pay for their membership through term-paper submissions to contribute to the overall knowledgebase.

imagineClub also managed to partner with Microsoft and therefore was allowed to offer the MSDN-Academic Alliance service to all of their members. Allowing members to freely download and use Microsoft development software like Visual Studio, Windows etc..

Why am I telling you all of this?

Well, half a year ago I agreed to become the assistant chairman of imagineClub! The old team is still there, but jobs and other things have taken over, so I was brought in to try to get iC back on track and to again provide real value to our members.

Right now, one of the major roadblocks for imagineClub is it’s website. In it’s current state none of the board members are able to add news or change anything about the site since the input forms are broken. Paper submissions have to go through email and get added to the database through raw SQL, making the MSDN-AA subsection of the site the only “working” part that doesn’t require direct SQL manipulation. Naturally, all of this has led to a terribly outdated website, no new papers since 2008 and besides MSDN-AA no real service for our members.

I’m planning to change this through writing a completely new website that does what it’s supposed to do, but also is completely open source!
I decided to go with the Castle MonoRail framework on this one since I already did enough ASP.NET MVC Projects in the past. A positive side-effect of this should also be to work on the MonoRail documentation to get it updated once again.

The whole project is once again up on Bitbucket, currently more of a project skeleton than a real application. But I do plan to finish the site sometime in July. I’m also very happy to announce that Kristof, a young designer/artist I’ve had the pleasure working with during my last projects, has agreed to contribute a brand new site design. He promised me to finish it this week, so work on the site should start pretty soon.

Filed under imagineclub, personal
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