IT Board Aims to Overhaul SGA Website, ClubDash

Members of the SGA IT board. Credit: Luke Sassa ‘25

A quick glance at the Marist College Student Government Association website reveals a severely outdated platform populated with information from previous administrations.

“The website that you see right now, it’s stuck in 2021,” said Jumin Shrestha ‘25, SGA chief information officer.

Shrestha and her Deputy CIO, Hodo Dualle ‘24, are leading the way in getting the SGA website fixed. The duo, each majoring in computer science, leads the SGA’s Information Technology board in all efforts related to technology and student government. Aside from updating the website, these include improving ClubDash, the College’s online platform for clubs, and managing the SGA’s Brightspace page.

Efforts to update and improve the SGA’s website, a vital tool for student accessibility, are not as simple as they may seem. The Marist Information Technology Division has requested that the SGA website be housed under the College’s official website, marist.edu. The revamped SGA website will be accessible via a tab on the official Marist website, yet will still feature its own design and layout separate from that found on the official Marist website.

The SGA site will retain its original URL domain to maintain ease of access. Despite this, the SGA IT board has had to transfer all of the information from the individual SGA website to the Marist website, a time-consuming endeavor when factoring in all the new changes being made.

“We take input from the [SGA] Communications board about the design, the theme, the layout, and we also talk to the Student Body President [Amanda DeFalco ‘24] about the features we want to keep from the website and what we don’t want to keep,” said Shrestha.

Among the new features that will be found on the revamped website will include a “Student Concerns” tab where students will be able to anonymously submit any suggestions or complaints they may have for the SGA administration. The new website will also make information such as contact lists and SGA office hours readily available, allowing members of the SGA to become more easily accessible to the student body.

“Most students don’t even know that we [in the SGA] hold office hours, so they could just drop by the SGA office and come to us with any of their concerns,” said Shrestha.

While Shrestha is eager to implement the new changes as soon as possible, there are still several steps her IT board must complete to bring it to fruition. Once the website’s final layout has been constructed and examined on the front end, documentation must occur so that future CIOs and IT boards can access how the website’s code works.

The final and most frustrating part of launching the new website is writing the site’s code. This step seemingly has the most significant impact on the project’s timeline.

“I feel like [the website will go live] within this semester,” said Shrestha. “I can’t give when exactly because you never really know. You think you have a good code, but then you run it, and there’s this whole mess that happens, so we are working on it. Once it’s all smooth, we’d want to make it live and start its promotion so that people know about it.”

While launching the new SGA site is Shrestha’s top priority, she is also awaiting access from the Marist IT Division to make changes to ClubDash, the College’s platform for club leaders. ClubDash was initially launched by the SGA IT board in 2013 to make life easier for club board members and Marist Student Activities. However, the platform’s lack of functionality has often made things even more confusing for all involved. Once Shrestha’s board gains access to the platform, they will revamp it with the Marist IT Division and Student Activities.

“ClubDash was all made up by a bunch of students, which considering that fact, it is impressive that they did that,” said Shrestha. “However, it is outdated, and we hear so many complaints… there are a lot of bugs that need to be fixed on ClubDash.”

The bugs on ClubDash can be found both on the front end for users and on the back end, as Student Activities has struggled to collect pertinent information from the platform. Often, priority point reports and club event evaluations fail to populate on the back end, leading to headaches for all involved. The worst bug of all involves the platform’s non-working “Allocations” tab, meant for club budget allocations; the tab is currently dated back to the spring of 2021, preventing club leaders from using it at the current moment.

For Shrestha, the task at hand is simple: she just wants all of ClubDash’s tabs to work properly and everything to run smoothly. While her board waits for access to begin enacting these changes, they will, in the meantime, give a presentation at the SGA’s Leadership Conference on Nov. 8 to show club leaders how to use ClubDash in its current form.

“I want to help make [ClubDash] a point of ease for both Student Activities and club board members,” said Shrestha.

Aside from her board’s top priorities, Shrestha has additional goals for this year. Her big goal is working on club emails; every SGA-chartered club receives a Marist email address for official club communications, yet not many clubs use these email addresses to send messages. Frequently, club leaders instead opt to communicate to club members from their personal Marist email addresses.

This has created an issue for Student Activities, as they often find themselves out of the loop on official club communications since they can only see messages stemming from official club email addresses. To remedy this, Shrestha is working to give out access to these official club email addresses to make it easier for Student Activities to track club operations.