ITP People Directory

The process

ITP has near 3000 people in its community of students, alumni, staff and faculty and all the previous generations of people connected. A request was made to consolidate multiple sources of ITP people information into a central directory - the Tisch database, the multiple ITP databases, Facebook - all these sources needed to be funnelled into one location so old databases can be pruned off and new popular resources can be tapped.

We decided to design a hub to connect and merge the multiple sources of information and work outwards. Each user would have 1 or more sources of information for herself, either from Tisch, Facebook or an ITP database. Each source would have 1 or more fields. Each source field for a user can hold 1 piece of data and privacy information making the fine tuning of privacy an option. What was possible with this type of architecture let us allow the user to pick where their data came from, for example, a profile photo could come from Facebook or it could come from ITP's first day picture. An email address can be private to the public but available to the ITP community.

The People Directory is now live and holds several thousand pieces of profile information. With the data an API was created and now feeds ITPedia an inhouse wiki about the history and people of ITP.