ASKSG is a comprehensive platform that corrals student ideas, questions, and concerns from a variety of online sources into a single portal for the RIT Student Government (SG). The goal is to enhance their relationship with students and to provide a channel for advice on what the governance body should focus on, such as programs or policies on campus to change, replace or recreate. ASKSG provides a common interface for all directed student questions and inquiries to provide an overarching picture of student sentiment. This interface, which meets federal accessibility requirements, will funnel student questions submitted through SMS, phone calls, and social media private messaging, and then enable responses to be reciprocated using the same incoming interface.
ASKSG will also integrate with social media services (e.g. Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook) to passively collect and collate data from student interactions and conversations and analyze it to identify patterns of shared thought among groups of students. Such information will be available to Student Government through a secure portal and formatted to allow for easy use in legislative, promotional and analytic duties. From this work, SG will have quantitative evidence to sustain policy changes and promote new programs and services, to respond promptly to direct inquiries, and indirectly identify issues discussed online by the student body. This will promote a new standard of information availability and enable the RIT SG to predict student interest and opinion changes over time to make the best decisions for the organization’s constituency.