YCN.club is a centralization-focused project that aims to provide institutions with the ability to store their data in one place; maintaining a single source of truth for documentation and other actions.
Colleges today have a strong focus on building a strong student community, with opportunities coming from every direction. While this is great for exposure, the sheer bombarding of information students receive from student clubs, external meetups, institutional events and placement groups ends up being lost in the chaos.
Imagine receiving an email for an internship you could've easily cleared, but you didn't see it in time because Club XYZ wants to send 127486 emails about their brand new event!
Exaggeration aside, it's important for institutes to maintain separate logical forums for this data, as more often than not, this information is also handled by different entities in the administration. Creating topic-specific spaces where students can go for event registration, college news and community exposure can go a long way in improving the overall student experience. That's what YCN.club stands for, and works (or worked) towards.
This project started under the name of mitblr.club, when we were in the first year of college at Manipal Institute of Technology, Bengaluru. Over time, looking at the structure of physical announcements and unorganized emails from the institute, we (Raghav and Abhigyan) decided that there was an imminent need of a system where students could find all college activities (events, notices, etc.) on one platform, and register from the same area without filling up a 100 different Microsoft Forms. This lead to the development of Noticeboard & Logistics.
Some screenshots from the Noticeboard application.
We further noticed that non-technical student clubs under the institiute were struggling to maintain an online brand identity, as building and maintaining a website is not everyone's cup of tea (nor does everyone have the resources in a college as brand-new as ours). This led to the development of our Website Templates, which allowed communities to start off their own websites from a single configuration file.
This only required them to write up a single JavaScript file with all the data, but heck, we wanted to make it so no-code that we ended up creating our own config. generators for it, along with a custom wrapper around the Notion API so that they could write their blog posts on Notion and it would directly update the website.
Did I mention we're college students?
A screenshot of the configuration generator for mitblr.club.
After all this, you'd think our college would be stoked about the 500+ man-hours of work we put in. They would definitely completely support our work and advertise everywhere that their students built this... right?
Turns out, the IT Department of Manipal Academy of Higher Education does not trust students. Their entire argument is that, "students are only a part of the institution temporarily, and thus cannot be the sole creators of large software that the institution depends on." While this is logically plausible, it contradicts with systems created by large universities to use long-term student-created projects.
We tried going through a lot of hoops in order for our ecosystem to get support. We promised comprehensive documentation of all our projects and guaranteed successive maintainers appointed from the junior batches. But we soon learned that MAHE was starting to work on our ideas by signing contracts with third-parties, with zero acknowledgement that our team brought in the idea and the execution.
The past 2.5 years of battling with the MAHE adminstration has been frustrating for us, to say the least. We keep trying to move fast and break things, but our body is now sore and our fingers are tired from typing out code that won't make it to production.
Even still, this organization exists as an ode to our stubbornness in maintaining ownership of the ideas that we came up with. No matter what our institute claims, or what they end up building with the help of external vendors, we provided the foundation that they work upon. This is our attempt to show that students can be developers too, and actually build large-scale projects for the betterment of their alma mater.
We welcome you to YCN.club - an ecosystem built for students, by students. If you feel that any projects here could be useful for your college, please feel free to use our work as your foundation. We'd love to see what you build.
- Repositories: https://github.com/YCN-club/noticeboard and https://github.com/YCN-club/logistics
- Contributors:
- Abhigyan Tripathi (GitHub) (LinkedIn)
- Repository: https://github.com/YCN-club/api
- Contributors:
- Raghav Gupta (GitHub) (LinkedIn)
- Hari Keshav Rajesh (GitHub) (LinkedIn)
- Kshitij Srivastava (GitHub) (LinkedIn)
- Repository: https://github.com/YCN-club/redirect
- Contributors:
- Abhigyan Tripathi (GitHub) (LinkedIn)
- Repository: https://github.com/YCN-club/linkedlist
- Contributors:
- Abhigyan Tripathi (GitHub) (LinkedIn)
- Repository: https://github.com/YCN-club/template
- Contributors:
- Abhigyan Tripathi (GitHub) (LinkedIn)
- Hari Keshav Rajesh (GitHub) (LinkedIn)
- Repository: https://github.com/YCN-club/helpdesk-website
- Contributors:
- Abhigyan Tripathi (GitHub) (LinkedIn)
- Satyajitsinh Digvijaysinh Jhala (GitHub) (LinkedIn)
- Repository: https://github.com/YCN-club/helpdesk-api
- Contributors:
- Raghav Gupta (GitHub) (LinkedIn)
- Aashi Aggarwal (GitHub) (LinkedIn)
