Outstanding Chapter Website 2011-2012

Name: Ain Shams University ACM Student Chapter
Address: Cairo, Egypt

About the chapter:

From the very beginning, in 2002, “acmASCIS” was founded to build a scientific community that aims at spreading knowledge and encouraging students to seek science as a way of life; for we are looking forward to a true revival for a community made by young computer scientists, and preparing a generation capable of advancing in its field. Moreover, we aim to qualify students to achieve high ranks in National and Regional contests to reach the ICPC world finals.

The acmASCIS steering committee consists of a President, a Treasurer, a Secretary, 6 committees’ Heads, and 33 committees’ members; moreover, the chapter has 18 active members that offer their help when needed. Among these members, there are 6 master students.

Since, our main goals are to prepare students from our faculty to reach the ICPC world finals, revive our community through becoming a wide channel for spreading knowledge, and help the students to develop a passion for science and admire learning. You will find that our online presence has been designed to tackle these points.

Outstanding Chapter Website:

The acmASCIS website is divided into 3 main divisions: main website, blog, and community portal. Our main website and blog are built over Wordpress an open-source, Content Management System (CMS) with a large array of plug-ins that are either written by us or are available online. As for our community portal, it is running a modified version of the Simple Machines Forum, which is in turn an open-source CMS for managing forums. Those three divisions of our website are written in PHP and JavaScript, while MySQL is used for maintaining the databases.

Viewing our website’s landing page (http://www.acmascis.org), gives you an overview of our upcoming events through the slider and gives you a glimpse of our latest events. By navigating to the “About Us” page, you can take a glance at the current steering committee, an introduction to the ACM, a description of our local chapter, both our mission and vision and the structure of the steering committee. By navigating to the “events” section, you are able to view a complete portfolio of our events categorized by their type. Each event entry typically contains a description of the event, accompanied by photos/video footage of that event. This part of our website plays an important role in publicizing our chapter’s activities to our community, as it is used to increase interest in our events that usually target making our community more familiar with computer science and its role in our lives.

Our blog (http://blog.acmascis.org) is where we host our weekly activities that include posts from some of the influential individuals—students and graduates—in our community, who have earned the community’s credibility through their contributions. Mainly, the posts are about interesting aspects of different fields of computer science and skill-building techniques. The weekly posts cover a broad spectrum of topics that span all the way from discussing accomplishments of world-known scientists, to introducing new breakthroughs and techniques in computer science and end up with a weekly mind-bending riddle that aims to challenge our avid subscribers.

Our community portal (http://forum.acmascis.org) provides our trainees with 24/7 support with any assistance they might need in their training, this aspect of our website is critical for the training our chapter holds. In addition, we have private sub-forums where the meeting minutes are documented and polls for gathering suggestions are held.

In order to keep our website up and running, and ensure that it keeps up with the needs of the chapter, a team is designated to maintain the website and implement any needed customizations.

In addition to the previously mentioned media, we are also using various social media and methods of communication to enforce our online presence. These include:

• A weekly email newsletter that allows us to communicate with our earnest subscribers and our trainees. This newsletter includes:

  • The last session’s materials including a presentation, practical problems and self-review problems.

  • An aggregation of the latest weekly activity posts.

  • A feedback form to maintain a constant feedback cycle of the sessions given to the trainees.

• Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/acmASCIS)

• Twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/acmascis)

• YouTube Channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/acmASCIS/videos)

Website Statistics