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MS3 5 Solution description
SENECApp ...
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... is a mobile application that acts as the single, go to space where student communities (and official university groups) at Uniandes are discovered, created, and sustained.
The application is built around three complementary flows, one per persona:
1. Discover: for students looking for a community
The student declares their interests during onboarding. From that point the application proposes groups instead of requiring the student to search. Every group (whether official or "informal" (the idea is that by creating a group its formalized per se)) has a public profile stating what it does, how often it meets, what level it expects, and how to join, so a student can evaluate the fit before showing up. A campus event feed shows what is happening today, filtered to the student's free time.
2. Create: for students who want to start something
A student publishes an interest rather than an organization: a short description, a proposed frequency, and a set of tags. Other students opt in. When enough people have opted in, the initiator can promote the interest into a group and communicate with a subscriber list that explicitly asked to hear from them. This replaces institutional email or WhatsApp conversations with a legitimate, consent based channel, and lets a founder measure demand before investing effort in formalization.
3. Sustain: for organization leaders
Group leaders get a management view: membership, event publishing, attendance registration, and reach metrics. This way, we replace spreadsheets and duplicated cross-platform posting that ends up being a mess for all the users.
| Pain point identified in research | How the solution addresses it |
|---|---|
| Discovery is fragmented across incompatible channels | A single application aggregates every group in one searchable, interest tagged directory |
| Informal groups are invisible next to official ones | Both are first class entities; ranking is driven by interest match, not by organization size or institutional status |
| Search returns competitive academies instead of casual groups | Group profiles declare level and commitment explicitly, and these are filterable dimensions |
| Reaching interested peers requires intrusive cold email | Students opt in to interests; founders only ever broadcast to a consenting audience |
| Formalizing a group costs more than a small group justifies | Interests can exist and gather members without formal registration |
| Leaders cannot predict attendance or detect member drop-off | Opt-in and attendance data are captured in-app and surfaced to leaders |
| Students only hear about events after they happen | Push notifications and a today-view aligned with the student's free blocks |
We know they were not explicitly requested in this point. However we believe they are worth mentioning ...
The application is not a static, there are three intelligent behaviours that are central to the value proposition:
- Interest based recommendation. A content based model matches the student's declared interests, program (major), and semester against group profiles, reinforced by a collaborative signal drawn from what similar students have joined. This is what closes the gap between a group for you exists and you know it exists — the exact failure our interviews documented.
- Context aware event surfacing. Using location and the gaps in the student's schedule, the application surfaces activities happening nearby during time the student actually has free, rather than broadcasting everything to everyone.
- Critical mass detection. The system monitors opt ins per interest and notifies the initiator when a nascent group has gathered enough members to be viable
Discovery happens on campus, in motion. It happens between classes, in free blocks, while walking past a poster. The solution depends on capabilities that only a mobile device provides: location for proximity based suggestions, push notifications for time sensitive events, and offline access to group information in buildings with poor connectivity.
Contributor: Nicolas Salazar Sanchez