Gig 'em, Aggies! At Texas A&M, a program gets partying students home safely

Computerworld - As I write this, a group of Texas A&M University students is gathered in College Station to make plans for the coming year. Like many college students across the nation, they're talking about drinking and partying. Unlike the vast majority, these Texas Aggies are formulating plans to keep their drinking and partying classmates, and the communities they live in, safe.

The students are members of CARPOOL, a nonprofit campus organization that provides free rides so students can avoid the deadly mix of drinking and driving. Joining them are several alumni, including Jeff Schiefelbein, class of 2000, who founded the organization following a 1997 DWI arrest. That life-altering experience brought Schiefelbein in contact with a woman who showed him a photo of her daughter, who had been killed by a drunken driver. CARPOOL was his response.

Also attending the gathering is John-Michael Oswalt, class of 2007, who's now working at Accenture in New York and is undergoing training to be an SAP project consultant. Oswalt is the technology guru behind CARPOOL, and I spoke with him shortly before the gathering.

He said he got involved in CARPOOL as a freshman, attracted by the camaraderie and spirit of service that were already its hallmarks. He joined as a driver, but it soon became clear that there was a way to make a much more lasting contribution: by using technology to make it far easier to ensure that rides were available when and where they were needed.

As a mechanical engineering major, Oswalt had no real programming experience, so he took a learn-by-doing approach that began with tackling ASP to build more functionality into the organization's registration Web site. He cut his database teeth with three MySQL databases on the back end: one for sign-up and membership information, one for scheduling and ride data, and one for nightly reporting of assignment and debriefing details. Oswalt built an AJAX interface for the reporting database that dramatically eased the debriefing effort and improved the quality of data used for basic analy??sis. By tracking how many rides are provided in College Station and the neighboring town of Bryan, for example, CARPOOL can provide the documentation needed to request grants from the two jurisdictions.

Oswalt also used ASP to develop the "phone room" application used by the dispatchers. Because of concerns about the chaos that would ensue if Internet connectivity was lost on a busy night, he installed the app on a LAN using Microsoft's Internet Information Services.

"I feel like I learned a lot, and that's partially what got me my job at Accenture," Oswalt said, stressing that he encourages students to get involved in activities like CARPOOL. "It really opened the door to me to find out how many opportunities there are to be creative with technology and to learn new things."

The Aggies are eager to work with other universities to take CARPOOL nationwide. To that end, Oswalt recently built a new version of the phone room app in PHP, because he'd heard that his counterparts at several other interested schools are more familiar with PHP than with ASP. He licensed the app under a Creative Commons license, which allows other schools to copy, share and alter the application as long as attribution is maintained.

Oswalt mentioned that he's sent the app to several other schools, including James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. His mention of that particular school hit close to home. That's the school I attended during my first year out of high school, back when it was called Madison College.

I don't drink, but I certainly don't judge anybody who does. I'm too thankful that I never hurt myself or anyone else during my drinking days as one of the dumber 18-year-olds at Madison. And I'm equally thankful to the Texas A&M students and alumni behind CARPOOL who have made College Station, Harrisonburg and a growing number of other communities safer. As they say in College Station: Gig 'em, Aggies!

Don Tennant is editorial director of Computerworld and InfoWorld. Contact him at don_tennant@computerworld.com, and visit his blog at blogs.computerworld.com/tennant.