History Book of BEST

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whether the company he likes most is coming to a job fair nearby.

• Minerva News Corner: All additional info (financial news, job-markets, CVguidelines, etc) can be added here.

In the beginning, the project was decided to run as a joined project, since it involved the job fairs organised by bonding as well, and thus it was the first step for the Cooperation of

BEST and bonding on covering level.

A lot of questions were raised on that meeting, and it was decided to write down clear guidelines to the board, in order to work out a precise working strategy till PM. The Working Group also worked on investigating the technologies that could be used in order to develop such a system. It was decided to use Lotus Notes for implementation, mainly because Lotus Notes was a mature system, and it was also used in the development of Johnny. On the other hand, it was thought that using such a popular tool would motivate people to join the group, since they could gain professional experience like this.

Last but not least, a lot of guidelines were defined on what the official name should be, specifications of company information (size of logo, location, countries that is present, etc. etc.), promotion of the service towards students and companies, costs and benefits of

Minerva and other various topics.

So like this, the service of Career support started growing in BEST.

Later on, a programmer team was selected in PM 1997 in Warsaw, to move on with the technical implementation of Minerva into Lotus Notes. 3 meetings were held afterwards

•in Copenhagen in December 1997

•in Barcelona in February-March 1998

•in Cluj-Napoca in April 1998

Sometime in the middle of 1998, Irina from Bucharest finished implementing Minerva with Lotus Notes as her diploma project. However the result is labelled as ‘unfitted’ to be presented to the companies. Main reason was the fact that Lotus Notes was not designed to support this kind of services, and it wasn’t totally under the control of the developers. That’s why, during the BEST-bonding WorkShop in Nuremberg in September of 1998, ITC members complained about working with Lotus Notes and decided to give up the idea of using it, and start to work on it with more familiar technologies (Java and SQL) which let them do a better Web layout, and fully control the technology.

ITC was so enthusiastic to start working on the new technology, that there was a meeting in Helsinki before the end of the year, to start implementing it. Later on the development went like this:

•Winter 1998 - Spring 1999: Sustained work on the new version, with 4 programmers actively involved: Cristi (TM), Toto (LLN), Marta (CJ), and Mirel (BC). More than 20 versions are released internally!

•February 1999: Lotus Notes training for ITC meeting in Paderborn, Germany

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that was paid by Lotus. The professional trainers confirm ITC members that their problems with Lotus Notes were legitimate, and that Notes is not so suitable for a service like Minerva

•GA 1999 in Lisbon: work continues, and a proposal for the Board taking care of the project is approved

•Middle of 1999: Mirel finishes Minerva in SQL as his diploma project

•July 1999: Meeting in the Athens SC, the metadata technology is designed

•August 1999: Bug fixes to Mirel’s version. Toto becomes the responsible of

Minerva development

•Autumn 1999: prior to the launch, the metadata technology is integrated in

Minerva, ensuring higher reliability and portability

•WorkShop Copenhagen September 1999: for the first time the software is thoroughly tested by non-ITC members and solid feedback is given. the bug database is built

•November 1999: Minerva is launched!

•PM 1999 in Chania: work on the metadata technology continues

•January 2000: A Minerva meeting is being held in Turin. The future of Minerva is discussed and an action plan is decided. Also a proposal to make a committee about Minerva in the upcoming GA is decided.

•2000: Cooperation of Minerva and EduCo projects was investigated. Outcomes from NEXUS (Needs and Expectations of University Students) were used and implemented in Minerva. No further development of Minerva was done, since there was a lack of people, and also the system was quite usable. During this period, the promotion of the service was widely investigated.

•WorkShop in Copenhagen March 2001: Discussions about the new design of

Minerva. A new design is proposed

•6th of June 2002: The new website of Minerva is launched. The new version

(called Minerva-TS) was developed using Makumba. After 8th of October, public statistics about Minerva are available for everyone.

•ICF 2003 in Timisoara: Talks about naming Minerva Committee to Career

Support Committee. Proposal was approved in GA 2003.

In 2004 Minerva service is renamed to BEST Career Centre (BCC), thus finishing the history of the service. The service now appears with the new name that represents in a better way what this service is about. A big era for BEST ends; however little things changed in the service with its change in name.

Makumba

Makumba is the main technology used in BEST IT systems, like BEST Application System,

BEST Career Centre, Private Area and Unified System. It is a technology specialised in producing WWW views of data stored in databases. The amateur developers and designers can engage with Makumba at three levels, in order of complexity, known shortly as “MDD”,

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“JSP taglib” and “BL” (Makumba Data Definition, Java Server Pages tag libraries and

Business Logic). Makumba is a query-centric technology designed by BEST that helps users to rapidly develop web applications that keep their data in a database (i.e. data driven web applications). It is implemented in Java and offers a JSP tag library and a Java API to the web application developer. The technology has been in use since late 2001, and is being further developed, based on users’ experience and requests.

Makumba was developed by BESTies mostly because a common data format for all the information was needed. Before Makumba, Java and Lotus Notes were used, without very big success. Furthermore, all the servers of BEST were not running windows, and this was a reason to refrain from using the typical choices of MySQL or ODBC. Last but not least, Makumba gathered from the very beginning only limited amount of features, and only the ones that are needed for BEST. This helped even inexperienced BESTies to learn this new system, since BEST students usually stay up to 3 years in the organisation, and easiness of learning was very important.

“The transfer from Lotus Notes format to the present Makumba format was done by me in a painful summer (2001). It was an automatic system that was connecting to the Notes (Domino)-generated PA website and was sucking all documents, member info (and maybe events) automatically. I made such an importer for Johnny as well (that was a bit easier, as I had internal knowledge of it), and a simpler system for Minerva which already had Makumba-like structures. All this was known as the “importer” (not exporter) project, and was one of my main efforts to get BEST IT to be independent of technologies that only a few people (or just I) knew.”(Cristi Bogdan, LBG Timisoara)

The development of the Makumba technology is active, since congresses are organised annually in order for developers to meet and evolve this tool. Since the beginning 6 congresses were organised and they resulted in the 0.8.1.9.1 version of Makumba. After so many years, Makumba proved to be a very reliable and appropriate technology for BEST, since the beginning of Makumba numerous different applications were developed using it. These applications are used daily by BESTies, and are the necessary tools for the current development of the organisation.

You can find more about Makumba in its official website:

www.makumba.org|http://www.makumba.org

-Protect your hardware, use Makumba “ITC SM 2004, Incukalns, Latvia”

BEST Career Center

BEST Career Centre is the continuation of the Minerva project. The project changed the name, keeping the same goals, just to represent in a more clear way what is it about. Since the birth of BCC, not so many things changed. Here is a short time line of what happened:

• GA 2006: CasCo, the committee of BEST that was taking care of BCC gets dissolved. finTeam is now responsible for the service.

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•2007: Local BEST Career Service is starting to get developed

•February 2008: BEST Career Centre is merged with BAS and Public Website, to form the Unified System of BEST.

•2008: Local BCS is used by the LBGs. Access to local companies is given, and they can only access CVs coming from the LBG that gave them the access. A lot of new features are developed during this year.

The launch of the Unified System is considered a great milestone for BCC, because it brought a very big growth in numbers of CVs available in the database. The reason was that via the Unified System, the uploading of the CVs was very easy and direct: users that wanted to apply to an event needed only some extra fields to be completed to have their

CV uploaded.

Jimmy

The Idea of this project was launched in finTeam in winter 2005. First work was done during the Workshop in Trondheim in February 2006. Later on, work continued during the finTeam Summer meeting in Vienna (August 2006) and finTeam Winter Meeting in Ljubljana (November 2006).

JIMMY was an idea of a service finTeam was developing in order to facilitate the cooperation between LBGs and companies. All LBGs would have the possibility to announce any event they were organizing; by this way, finTeam thought that they could attract potential partners

(companies). These events would be promoted to companies, via the Public Website, Newsletters and other means of promotion.

Recruiters would thus be able to choose among a large choice of events across Europe that would support their recruiting strategy (which universities/faculties, which countries/cities they want to target).

A link between this system and the BEST University Centre was planned as well, in order to offer the HRs a complete description of the university where each event was taking place.

Companies would have the possibility to cooperate with all these LBGs, however it was decided that the communication will be facilitated by finTeam.

A proposal was also made, that they would sign a ‘Global contract’ will all BEST. This means that they would get one offer for all the events they showed interest in plus of the cooperation with BEST. The purpose behind this was of course to strengthen the common image of our organization towards companies.

The original idea was about announcing Local Career Events that LBGs were organising. However, this was later broadened and more types of events (like courses, competitions etc.) were included in the final implementation of the feature.

After a lot of development and testing, the tool was finally launched on 30th of July 2007, and is still used with great success.

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Johnny

Taken its name after the anonymous Romanian, Johnny was the system that is now known today as BEST Application System (BAS). It all started around 1997, when Johnny was first used, and this brought an end to the paper applications.

Have you ever heard that story of how our friendly application robot for season courses got its name however? The story that tells about a few inspired BEST members talking one night about creating a new software for BEST, while drinking their favourite whisky. And when the time came to find a name, the whisky once more brought the inspiration. Did Johnny

Walker really lend its name to our oldest web application? Actually, no. That story is rubbish, a fantasy much more colourful than the simple, arbitrary truth. This is the true story of the anonymous Romanian.

BEST has been organizing summer courses since 1991. Given the small scale and state of technology at the time, the administration of the student applications was based on paper forms. At General Assemblies application forms were exchanged and selections decided upon. Over time, a fax was added, and email, and some computer programs, and most of all, chaos. Around 1995 there was an attempt of decentralised automation, with software written by LBG Grenoble: all LBGs were to run the software client locally, enter selected applications, and send the data files to Grenoble were the overall optimisation of selections was performed.

“About pre-1996 electronic optimization attempts, I vaguely remember attempts starting _ before_ 1993. An important name is Frederic Ranno from Grenoble, who also made the first

BEST WWW pages. In 1993 there was no electronic SP optimization support, as I was in the board (as GA organizer who was part of the board at the time since the GA was the biggest international project...) and remember that there was hardly any SP coordination in 1993 and the board had to take things over during spring. I remember sitting in a Copenhagen computer lab and trying to implement the optimization after the Board meeting in summer 1993. In 1994 or 1995 (or both) things got better, I remember that at least LBGs who did their homework could use the software (not sure if it ran at the LBGs or only in Grenoble). Ovidiu’s radical WWW proposal was accepted at Trondheim PM in 1995.”(Cristi Bogdan, Alumni LBG Timisoara)

By 1996 time had come to bring some web technology to the mix.

In1996,OvidiuSandor,aRomanianBESTiedoingpost-graduatestudiesinStockholm,started on implementing web-based software to automate the Summer Season administration.

Summer 1996 saw the first implementation, with limited functionality.” Technically the SP96 system was a suite of programs written in C, using a Netscape web server to deliver services over a plan CGI interface.” (Cristi Bogdan, LBG Timisoara)

Students would still fill in paper forms, while LBG members would register these applications

(short form) through the web. The system was _not_ called Johnny at the time. Johnny was the new java version Cristi Bogdan and Ovidiu Sandor made together for Summer 1997.

The latter identified the optimisation algorithm as what Computer Science terms “the stable

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marriage problem” The announcement process started already in late 1996 hence Johnny architecture and the needed features were ready by then. The limited access to the Internet for the mass of the European students inhibited the full automation of the process until some time in 1998-1999.

Cristi Bogdan receiving flowers for Johnny server

After SP96, implementation started on a completely new version. Interestingly, a new programming language for web applications was developed in the process. This was the Java Mark-up Language (JML), a language similar in concepts to JHTML and JSP which were developed later by commercial companies. The new version of Johnny was ready for summer 97, and was fairly complete in functionality. It was also known as Johnny97. When spring 98 came on as the first non-summer season, Johnny98 was finalised to be seasongeneric and to reuse 10-digit codes (the students’ logon) across seasons.

All systems that existed before Johnny were made solely for optimization (not the full support you know today) for several reasons:

•It was the only phase that required more than 1-2 LBGs to complete and

•It is an algorithm operation that we associate with computers.

In other words we didn’t realize how useful computers/WWW would be to announce events, manage application, participation, etc. We were also quite conservative, e.g. in the area of paper motivation letters.

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The development of Johnny gave rise to the beginning of the ITC group, which was soon after getting ready for new developments such as Private Area (in 1997, using Lotus Notes technology) and Minerva (failed in Lotus Notes, then implemented in JHTML). This is relevant for the further evolution of Johnny in 2 ways: it drew resources away from further Johnny development, and it also illustrated the point that there was a growing need for more web applications and for integrating these on one technology and one dataset.

In the time that Johnny was left alone (middle of 1998 - early 2002), it started to grow out of its architectural limits. It had been implemented without a database (Java interfaces to databases were unstable and experimental in 1996) and this became an urgent problem by 2000. Johnny was publicly known to be unstable under heavy load, and only a complete architectural changeover would help. Around this time, every season’s application deadline would bring Johnny to its knees, forcing SPOC and ITC to repeatedly postpone deadlines. This was also the time of the so-called 24-hour Johnny watches, who would monitor Johnny around the clock in the days before the deadline, restart it when needed, and suggest deadline postponements to SPOC and the (worried) board.

In 1999 Cristi Bogdan and others started on the development of a new unifying technology that would become the platform for developing the next generation of BEST’s web applications: Makumba, which builds upon JSP. It took till the end of 2001 to get Makumba ready, and offer it to ITC as a tool to (re-)implement new and old web applications.

On the 19th of April 2002, after 1 week of close to 24/7 last minute programming and testing (involving all of SPOC in the testing), the new version of Johnny (called Johnny-TS, transitional system) was launched just in time to accept applications for the new summer season. It was far from ready, but if Johnny98 had not been replaced, the whole system risked a fatal crash. As the summer season evolved, the ITC team completed Johnny-TS step-by-step, each phase only just in time ready to support the next step of the season. It was one of the most stressful times in ITC, involving not only programming but pro-active communication with BEST and all the thousands of students who had applied. The rest of the summer was used to improve the hurried implementation, and by October 2002, an important new part was launched: the replacement of 10-digit codes as logon mechanism, by actual usernames and passwords. It was the first important procedural change in the

Season process since 1998.

Since then, changes to Johnny have been limited to adding small features here and there. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a list of more radical change requests for Johnny. But there is less urgency for those, which is as much a comfort as and obstacle? Here is a list of features that were developed since then:

• 2002:

o All Vivaldi processes are supported by Johnny

• 2003:

o ICF 2003: Johnny Privacy Policy, Superuser Account usage and a watch schedule are defined.

• 2004:

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o Johnny was integrated into Private Area, creating the Johnny LBG Area. Before that, Johnny was totally depended from Private Area.

o Johnny is renamed to BEST Application System

This is how the story of Johnny ends. However Johnny the very heart of Johnny still exists and is being used by thousands of students every season.

And Johnny, why Johnny? Cristi told us this: “Johnny was used in Romanian everyday speech to name anonymous people. Before PM 1996 in the IPLab kitchen (IPLab is a former KTH department), Ovidiu asked me “How should we call this Johnny guy?” I replied “There you said it”, and that was that. The rest are rumours.”

Famous Quotes about Johnny:

-If Johnny is not running, ITC is running ‘’”ITC SM 2005, Lodz, Poland”’’

BEST Application System

BEST Application System, also known as BAS, is the newer name of Johnny, the online application that enabled students to apply to our events online through the internet. The name started being used after PM 2004, where there was a proposal to change its name to its current one, so it represents better what it is, and is also easier for people to understand and remember it.

Since BAS was the continuation of Johnny, all its features were kept the same; only thing that changed was the name (in fact, in the Makumba Data Definitions, the system is still called Johnny. It wasn’t changed due to re-factoring difficulties). Here is a short presentation of the features developed for BAS:

• 2004

o April: Crash of the production server caused postponement of the application deadline, reason was that people didn’t know that optimisation wasn’t automatic

o December: Superuser access rights changed from password to list.

Superusers’ access was defined from being in a specific list or not. Superuser pages show deposit/attendance information. Restricted event editing by organisers after the announcement deadline

• 2005

o BAS LBG Area is integrated with Private Area o New page with address lists for an activity. o New page with attendance statistics.

o New superuser area features.

o Improvements in the main page for students. o Tracking of deposit return in BAS

o BAS LBG Area available in view-only more for all LBG members

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• 2006

o Students can upload a picture

o Students can add arrival and departure dates o Students can share personal information

o LBGs can announce local events and students can apply to them o Organisers can upload the CIF in Private Area

• 2007

o P@B is available to LBGs

o Recognition fields are available when announcing an event o Organisers can register to [BAS|BEST.BAS] events

o Organisers can submit their evaluation

o All past, current and future seasons are available in one page o Courses mailing lists are supported

o Possibility to upload multiple CIFs

• 2008

o Unified System is launched!

o Application to local events from a BAS account is enabled

o Extra-acceptance feature is implemented.

This is the short history of BEST Application System so far. The work done on it is continuous and never-ending.

BEST Teachers’ Area

The idea of this project started back in EEC Summer Meeting 2005 in Timisoara. The story goes like this:

There was a course about Interaction Design at the same moment as the Meeting, and two Nordic professors were present there. During the International Evening, they were offering a lot of ouzo to people, and two EEC members got interested at them. After breaking the ice and starting talking with them, the idea was dropped: to create a system that would allow teachers to access BAS, and view information about participants and upload documents related to the lectures. The idea of professors evaluating our courses was also there.

The point behind this was to enhance the communication between participants, organisers and professors, while at the same time increase the quality of the lectures, due to the pre materials that would be provided.

The idea started getting developed rapidly, and in 2006 the first pages were already coded

(it was called P@B back then). The coding part was launched during the Developers Meeting in Thessaloniki (August 2006), and a lot of work was completed during it. Part of the design was also done during the BAS SIM in Liege (November 2006), where a lot of pages were created, together with the help files and instructions on how to use the tool (both for LBGs and professors).

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The first testing version of the feature was presented in late Spring Season 2007, and some LBGstookpartinthistesting.HoweverthefeaturewasofficiallylaunchedforSummerSeason 2007. Later on, the BEST Teachers’ Area was included in the Unified System, and professors needed no longer to access a different website in order to log in into the system.

BEST University Centre

The first steps

BEST University Centre made its first appearance in the very first BEST Meeting, Grenoble in March 1988. It was decided that this new association will have a lot of aims, but one philosophy: “Promote Europe amongst Europeans”. For this reason, the V.I.A. (Very Important Aims) were set:

•Make available clear information about every university in the EAU to all interested parties.

•Mediate between universities in the EAU and between universities and firms.

•To support student initiatives concerning European-orientated affairs when possible.

It is clear that the very first Aim of BEST was to spread information about Universities among students, something that still is the main purpose of BEST University Centre. However, the next step took some time till it happened. In a Workshop in Paris (ENSTA) in 1995, The Concept of Information Centre appeared again. The idea was to have a new WWW page in all the LBGs containing the necessary information for students coming from abroad to study in their university (general introduction, university matters and practical information).

All the pages, prepared and kept updated at local level in each LBG, should have the same structure, so that the student could easily find what they need, also comparing the equivalent information in different universities. To make it in a very simple way, a skeleton that should be filled following this common structure was prepared: it was containing explanations and examples that just need to be substituted by the text and the links that already had been referring to your university.

Half a year later, this idea was asking to be approved on GA Tallinn 1996. The proposal was about approving the structure of data discussed at WorkShop Paris (and getting a coordinator of the Information Centre). LBGs should have their information centre in operation by PM ‘96, and the list of Universities should be updated yearly. BEST should also collect and publish information about possibilities of having a Thesis abroad, and this information should be updated regularly, as often as there are updates. However these actions were not followed, and seemed that the idea died for a few years.

Next time the topic was brought up, was during a WorkShop in 2000 in Bucharest. There the Minerva discussion group made a few proposals on how the co-operation between universities and Minerva should be arranged. It was desired to have a web page within the Minerva site, dedicated to universities. This page would contain information about universities and activities that would take place at a specific university. All this information that someone can usually find on the university web page, but the idea was to have it more

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