The University intends to acquire Mocha, the student-run course-searching application, Computing and Information Services officials and Mocha's student developers told The Herald.
"We have officially decided to adopt the Mocha functionality," said Michael Pickett, vice president for computing and information services and the University's chief information officer. "By January 1, CIS will definitely own that piece of the code."
Launched in January 2006 by five students concentrating in computer science, Mocha quickly gained popularity as a user-friendly alternative to the Brown Online Course Announcement for its ease of use and "shopping cart" feature. But it wasn't until the recent switch to online course registration under Banner and the introduction of the ill-received Banner Catalog and Schedule applications that Mocha seemed to become the default course index of choice for students.
"I'd like to think that Mocha solves a lot of problems that I and a lot of other people had with Banner," said Daniel Leventhal '07, who led the original Mocha development team. Leventhal estimated that about 80 percent of undergraduates have used Mocha.
Recognizing deficiencies in Banner's course indexing systems, Pickett, Associate Provost Nancy Dunbar, who led the Banner implementation project, and CIS Director of Applications Development John Styer met with Leventhal and other members of the Mocha team over the summer and in recent weeks to discuss incorporating Mocha's features into the Banner system.
Styer said the University is committed to integrating Mocha - which is currently hosted on a computer science department server - but may take one of two paths on the way.
"One path would be to take the software that Dan and his buddies created and host it on our server," Styer said. "The other one is not to take the software, per se, but build our own program that uses their ideas and functionality."
Styer has formed a team within CIS to assess the different strategies. He said a final decision should be made by winter break, with hopes to have the new interface live by the April pre-registration period for Fall 2008. In the meantime, a link to Mocha has been added to the Banner project Web site.
Many of the details of the transaction between the Mocha team and CIS have yet to be resolved. No agreement has been reached about whether money will be involved or whether ownership of the code will transfer to the University.
"We don't want to give up our intellectual property rights," said Colin Gordon '08, who took over Mocha along with two fellow computer science concentrators when four of the original developers graduated last spring. "We did write this code."
Leventhal and Gordon said they would prefer to grant the University a license to use and manipulate their code but not to redistribute it.
They also said they will ask for financial compensation.
"I think Mocha has value," said Leventhal, who now develops applications for Microsoft. "But that's something I would have to talk about with other people at Brown and CIS."
Pickett said he hasn't received an offer from Leventhal or made up his mind about what to do if asked for money.
"Things like this have happened before at other universities without money involved," said Pickett, who was deputy chief information officer at Duke University before coming to Brown over the summer. "I will certainly take them out to dinner."
Pickett added that he would consider providing financial support to the Mocha developers if they wished to improve the system.
"If Daniel and his team came to us today and said, 'Here are five things that would really make the system a lot more usable and more helpful - can you support us while we try this out?' I would be very supportive," he said. "I would not mind making a financial contribution to students or faculty to help them develop a useful tool for the University."
Gordon said he and other members of the Mocha team haven't come up with a financial request yet, but he said they would like to be rewarded for their work.
"The amount would be nontrivial, but not Banner-level," Gordon said. "Not 10 bucks, but not 23 million."
Pickett and Leventhal said the process has been friendly and productive for both parties and may encourage the University to support more student projects.
"We've always been in contact, and we're all on the same page," Leventhal said.
"It's something we need to do more of. We need to have a regular process by which we can have faculty and students build systems as prototypes and be recognized by the University," Pickett said. "I'm very, very happy with the process. I couldn't have asked for a better example of what deserves promotion at this level."
