Technologies Used

• PHP
• MySQL
• HTML
• CSS
• Dreamweaver

LegMan: Legislative Management for Student Government

A online system created to enhance transparency and communication in student government.

The Problem

Iowa State’s Government of the Student Body had some key flaws in its Senate workflow. The Senate, whose task it is to draft, debate, and enact legislation related to student and campus issues, was operating inefficiently because of a paper-only legislative process. New legislation was submitted on paper to the office, but copies were not distributed to members until at the Senate meeting - meaning that senators had no time to research or discuss new bills beforehand. Additionally, other students on campus also had no way of knowing when legislation they might care about would be debated, so outside attendance at meetings was low.

My design of LegMan, 2006	The current design, showing the Admin view of the current legislation list

The Process

As the Director of IT, I made it my task to bring GSB into the information age. The idea of using an online system for managing our legislation was not a new one - a previous senator had created an initial framework for LegMan. However, there had been no buy-in at the time from the Senate, so the project had been abandoned.

Starting from the current PHP code, I spent the summer developing LegMan to fix the current bugs and create an online legislative workflow that worked. This included allowing senators to log in and upload bills, displaying a list of all current legislation with information about how far each bill was in the legislative process, and archives of legislation from previous semesters. Once back at school, I tested the site with several senators to address any remaining problems.

I knew that gaining acceptance from the Senate would be the biggest hurdle, so I met with the Speaker of the Senate to get his buy-in and help in setting a date for switching over to LegMan. To make the process go smoothly, I gave a training session on LegMan to the Senate and worked closely with the Senate over the course of the semester to give assistance.

The Result

LegMan has been extremely effective for the Senate. It made the process faster, by allowing senators to view others’ new legislation as soon as it was uploaded. It created an online archive of legislation, easily accessible from anywhere. And, it enhanced transparency of our government, since because the data was stored in a database, the legislation information could also be shown on the public website to let students know what the Senate was working on (see more on about this on my Seniors Honors Project page). Attendance at meetings rose as a result.

Currently, LegMan is still being used and developed by the Senate.