Abstract:

At a university campus, often problems and complaints or even suggestions for improvement arise regarding infrastructures, services, policies or mismatches. Usually, specialized services and departments are assigned the responsibility of detecting, managing and solving such problems. However, the involved personnel is often limited and the workload flow manifests in a rather ad-hoc, asynchronous and - at times - overwhelming manner.

The academic community within a university campus - i.e., students, faculty members, administrative stuff even visitors in the context of ERASMUS mobility programs or other research and development activities - form an active group of individuals who could significantly contribute in reporting problems at an early stage. Taking also into account the extreme popularity of internet-connected mobile devices (like smartphones, tablets, laptops), it seems that the members of the academic community could themselves help in healing problems and malfunctions within a campus. Sending email or call notifications is not effective since neither members of the academic community always know where to address them, neither authorized departments and services can immediately react in an efficient way.

Motivated by these facts, we designed and developed a web application, fixCampus, which can act as an online aggregator of observed problems, complaints and malfunctions within a campus as well as a very effective proxy between the academic community and the administration in real time in a simple and elegant way. fixCampus is a user-friendly, responsive web application which enables registered users to report in seconds - also pinpointing on a map if they wish - any problem they observe or experience withtin the campus. User reports are classified into mainly predetermined classes so that it is easier for the administratative departments in charge to immediately locate those in their authority and offline route fixing actions. Users of fixCampus can view registered, pending and closed issues visualized on an interactive map as well as time elapsed between reporting and fixing problems. fixCampus was developed using state-of-the-art web technologies and tools including node.js, express.js, embedded JS (ejs), html, css.

Maintaining a well-functioning campus should be a shared objective pursued based on collective effort. Communities' collective efforts can result in major and multilateral benefits for these communities. In addition to its apparent usefulness towards this direction, fixCampus can highlight the significance and promote the active involvement of the academic community to issues related to a well-preserved environement of a university campus.

Keywords:

Responsive web app, campus problems reporting and fixing, online aggregator, collective effort and intelligence, node.js, express.js, embedded JS, html, css.