This year the Computer Science Club endorses Ian Lee for Student Body President based on his Technology platform and presentation at the Tech forum.
For more details about the Tech forum, please continue reading. If you have any questions (including if you're one of the candidates!), our contact information is at the bottom of this write-up.
The platform score is 40% of the total score. The other 60% is based on the presentation that was given at the forum. In evaluating the presentation score, the club gave consideration to overall knowledge of UNC's IT (both breadth and depth), feasibility of their implementations, and their coherence to their written platform.
In order to determine our rating of your platform, first, we as a group determined what we thought the important tech. issues campus faced going into next year and the foreseeable future. We then rated the candidates based on how many of these issues were addressed, as well as giving minimal points for other issues brought up by the candidates.
Our list of issues includes:
Connect Carolina -- Student Government serves as a key point for addressing student grievances. Considering the grumbling about CC this year--how will your administration address that?
Student organization websites -- changes have been made to how student orgs address webspace. How will you deal with publicizing this / making sure each group has easy access to publicize their group? Is this even SG's job?
Publicizing existing tech. resources on campus
Following is a break-down of each of the candidates.
Ian
We thought it was really important that Ian addressed that ConnectCarolina is an important tech concern facing the university in the near and far future. We thought that it was commendable that he pointed out specifics in ConnectCarolina that needed to be improved, but the few things he pointed out in his online platform (i.e. new grads system) are in place to happen next year anyway. We wish that he expressed more desire to find out from the student body what they wanted to see from Connect Carolina.
Even though one of Ian's largest points was ubiquitous wi-fi, which is something that been considered and contentious in the past, we felt like he defended his point very well. Ian explained at the forum, that he felt like wi-fi in the dorms and other places on campus, was more than a technical issue, but actually a signal of the university's technical prominence and in short: a good advertising measure for the university. We also liked that he emphasized that it was a long term goal and not something that he necessarily expected to accomplish in the next year.
TL;DR
As a club, we thought that Ian had the best vision for technology issues on campus that face students and also has the technical know-how to face new challenges that could crop up.
Brooklyn
Brooklyn has built her campaign around being a connector, and one concrete way she showed that this would be useful as SBP is in pointing out that ConnectCarolina needs to conform to the policies of various administrative communities on campus, from Admissions to Advising.
We appreciate Brooklyn's admission of not having personal technical know-how that Ian does. And we do appreciate that she believes strongly in connecting and finding people with expertise in specific issues, including technology. However, we were not convinced that she has the direction and the overall vision in order to take other people's experiential input and turn it into directed, specific goals. Brooklyn could do well, but she would take a long time to ramp up to speed: time that a 1-year SBP does not have.
Mary
We appreciated Mary's breadth of knowledge and numerous tech issues on campus her platform addressed. We commend her ability to talk on all these disparate points at the forum. We especially like that she believes strongly in publicizing the already available resources on campus.
However, we felt that despite the many great tech points she had, there was no coherent vision driving her technical platform. Even in her written five-year plans and ten-year plans, there is very little coherency. Nor, did she bring up her ideas for Carolina being a technical innovator at the forum.
We really liked Mary as a candidate, both generally and as from a tech point of view, but Ian pulled through because of our sense that he had a stronger vision.
Rick
Unfortunately, Rick cited other commitments this evening and could not attend our forum. Based on his written platform, we appreciated that Rick thought that ConnectCarolina was an important issue (duh, we agree), however he didn't state any specific plans regarding ConnectCarolina.
Max Beckman-Harned
macmaxbh@email.unc.edu
Tech&Web Co-chair, Medlin & Jones administration
Maggie Zhou
mz@unc.edu
CS Club President, 2008-2011
Roger Que
query@unc.edu
Class of 2012 (aka. will still be around)
Aditya Anand
adityaa@email.unc.edu
Class of 2014