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ABSTRACT
This report presents a proposal for a public voting system to be developed
as part of the e-Campus project. This is an important area for
development because the opinions of students are pivotal to the future of
the university, and such a system can increase awareness of important
matters. The aim of this project is to develop an interactive voting system
with which users can participate using their mobile phone. The project
will involve three phases: the development of a graphical front-end to the
voting system; the development of a method of interaction with mobile
phones, and the development of a web-based administration tool. The
results from the proposed project will be an integrated system capable of
receiving input from mobile phones, manipulating the received data and
outputting it to users in a graphical form via plasma screens located
around the university campus.
1. INTRODUCTION
A critical factor in running a university is that the needs and wants of students are catered
for. Collecting the opinions of a such a large number of people is not an easy task. A new
form of data collection needs to be developed in which large numbers of students can air
their views on a range of matters of interest to the university.
"Campus is a place cut-off from the rest of the world... Students are
disinterested and often blatantly unaware of what's going on
around them..."
~ Graduate Student [1]
The rationale behind this work is to increase students interest in events happening around
them – whether this be in the scope of a campus environment, the UK or worldwide – and in
maintaining this interest to result in increased awareness of the “outside world”. The
proposed system would accomplish this by publicising a range of events, while also asking
for the opinions of students on these matters.
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Over 75% of adults and 90% of young people currently own a mobile phone [2] and they are
an essential part of student life. As they are so common they make an ideal medium for
communication with a public voting system.
The proposed system will provide an attractive graphical front-end which acts as the main
point of interaction with users and will be distributed on plasma screen located around
campus. Users will be able to interact with the screen using their mobile phone. The topics
on which users can vote can be edited by the student union using a web-based administration
tool.
The system will be called UniVote and the URL univote.co.uk will be used to access any
online elements of the project.
This report contains a further four sections. Section 2 gives further background information
on technical aspects and structure of the system. Section 3 discusses development of the each
stage of project and how such a system would be tested. Section 4 details the tasks required
to complete the project, and a timescale to complete them in. Section 5 specifies the hardware
and software resources required by this project. The final section lists the references used
while writing this report.