Mocha can do just about anything except register for classes. Banner's new course scheduler can do that, though it lacks some of Mocha's user-friendly features.
But a union between these two systems is unlikely to occur.
Brown's new brew
Anyone who has felt appreciative enough of Mocha to look at its "About" page is familiar with its story.
Four computer science concentrators created the software over the 2005-06 winter break as an alternative to the Brown Online Course Announcement system, or BOCA. Written in the programming language Java, their brainchild came to be known as Mocha. Since its launch in 2006, Mocha has been immensely popular among the student body.
Despite its popularity, Mocha has not officially been supported by Brown. Since the Office of the Registrar does not send course information to Mocha's developers, Mocha's course listings and course information may be out of date at any time. When the site's developers realize the Registrar has updated Brown's class listings after the initial course announcement, they repeat the process of downloading the course descriptions to refresh Mocha. But they have no warning of when these updates come after each semester's course announcement.
Co-founder Dan Leventhal '07 explained that Mocha's developers never made a strong push for access to Brown's raw course data.
"Nobody really felt like it was that urgent," Leventhal said. "We already had something that worked."
Leventhal also said the developers figured the University's Computing and Information Services and the registrar's office had more than enough on their plate dealing with financial and scheduling setbacks in launching Banner, which finally became active in April 2007.
"At no time were we feeling like we were being blown off," he said. If the students had gone to Brown administrators and said Mocha would no longer be able to run without access to the course data, he said, he suspects an agreement would have been reached to keep Mocha operational.
In good company
Michael Pickett left a post at Duke University to become Brown's vice president for computing and information services in 2007. Leventhal, then a senior, was a member of the search committee that selected Pickett after Banner was launched.
"He has a big job in front of him, which would be true for anyone coming here," Leventhal told The Herald in an April 4, 2007, article. "At the same time, I think that bringing in someone new who doesn't have experience with how things are done at Brown could be great for the University. He brings a whole new perspective and approach to the position."
In the same article, Pickett told The Herald, "Brown is different from a lot of other universities. There is a spark of creativity and innovation here among students, faculty and administrators that I'm excited to be a part of." And Pickett still stands by those words.
In an interview with The Herald earlier this week, Pickett said he has always considered helping Brown entrepreneurs succeed an important part of his job.
As the son of an inventor, Pickett easily assumed an advisory role to the young Brown innovators.
Going so far as to take the students out to dinner a few times, he talked with them about business models and what they wanted to see happen with their creation. Preserving the functionality of Mocha for Brown students was a priority for all parties from day one, Pickett said.
In 2008, Mocha's crew incorporated the site into a limited liability corporation called Siliconfections. They moved it off of the Brown computer science department's servers, and paid for web hosting with the commissions they made when users clicked on links from their site to Amazon.com.
Pickett also set up talks with the Brown Bookstore, leading to Mocha's inclusion of links to buy textbooks from the store's site.
"We wanted to make sure they didn't step on any toes in a way that could be avoided," Pickett said. "And I think everyone got what they wanted."
A protege comes along
In 2007, Leventhal said Mocha's developers had two or three rounds of meetings with CIS in which the idea that the University might buy or otherwise acquire Mocha was discussed.
"They didn't really want to pay us the kind of money that we thought it was worth," Leventhal said. "We'd rather keep running it and learning from it than get a hundred dollars for it."
"Plus, taking on a new piece of code is not necessarily cheap if you're not familiar with it," Leventhal said, adding that the developers would not be interested in maintaining a program for the University that they did not control.
He also had concerns that if the developers did sell the company and Mocha declined in quality, they would be disappointed. Besides, making money was never the developers' goal since they founded Mocha, he said.
After most of the developers graduated and spread out across the country, Leventhal said, talks became more difficult to arrange.
"I may not have put the right deal on the table at the right time," Pickett said. "But I think they just wanted to run it for themselves."
The year that most of Mocha's developers graduated, the University began developing what Pickett called a "rough prototype" of the course scheduler application that was released on March 15.
"It's not intended to knock Mocha out of the water," Pickett said. "And we're not going to get into the business of linking to Amazon or anything like that."
More than 5,000 students have used Brown's course scheduling application this semester, Pickett wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. The average cart size is about six courses.
Leventhal was a bit surprised when he found out the University was making its own system. But he said Mocha's founders — all of whom now have full-time jobs — will continue to run the site as long as it is used.
"One of the things we always liked about Brown is that it's easy to shop courses," Leventhal said. "But if you don't have the right tools, there are going to be courses you don't see."
Pickett said he hopes to see more innovation on the part of students stemming from the flow of public information out of the University as Mocha did.
"As an entrepreneur, you try different things and sometimes it will work out and sometimes it won't," Pickett said. "But either way, you learn from it."
