by James Reed
With an organization as large as RoboJackets, it’s no surprise that we face many challenges associated with simply keeping the organization running smoothly. Thankfully, we have talented individuals across the organization who volunteer their time to handle anything and everything, from placing and receiving orders for the materials we use, to bringing you this newsletter!
One such group of dedicated individuals is our very own RoboJackets IT team. While the team is small, usually only consisting of around 6 people depending on the year, their impact is immense. Our IT team manages many behind-the-scenes aspects of our work, such as access management for the many services we utilize in our day to day operations, like GitHub and Dropbox, and maintaining our own internal network and servers. The flagship project of our IT team is MyRoboJackets, a custom built web app, which we use to track important information including dues collection, attendance, demographics, and our resumé book.
COVID-19 has certainly presented a whole new set of challenges for us to handle. Most importantly, how can we ensure the health and safety of our members while they work? Sometime around April, it became clear that we would need to be ready to answer this question come August. We would need to be able to track and manage the amount of members within our space in the SCC in order to adhere to occupancy safety guidelines and recommendations. The existing options to solve this problem require additional hardware and are costly to implement. With this challenge in mind, our IT team planned a hackathon to develop our very own solution, which would become the People Counter System. With the People Counter System, pictured above this article, we accurately manage the amount of people within our space. The system is contactless, BuzzCard-compatible, and required no additional funds to implement. The People Counter System is currently used not only by RoboJackets, but also was adopted by all of the other organizations within the SCC after our success to keep our members safe!