What started as a “handshake agreement” between Amrit Saini and Student Senate to continue reworking its website resulted in the organization opting for help from the university.
The senate will go live with a site via Ohio University’s Office of Information Technology this week. OU offers all student organizations websites free of charge, but the university’s home page will uniquely link to the senate’s site.
The senate originally had a university site as a student organization, but Saini took the information and retooled it when the organization purchased its own Web domain—oustudentsenate.com—during the 2012-13 academic year.
A contract dispute led him to unlink the updated site from his server to the Web domain in late September, and the site went black.
Saini was compensated $1,600 for his work on the site as the senate’s vice president; he was not yet compensated for his additional work on the site via his company, Reach Web Solutions, LLC.
“It’s always been there, offered to us, and I don’t know if in the past we (had) even known that, and so it’s just something we’ve looked more into now,” said Anna Morton, senate’s vice president.
Senate’s executive board will be responsible for uploading content to the site, though OIT will assist in adding features such as a comment box and Twitter feed.
“For transitioning of different senates throughout the year it’s going to be extremely easy to work with OIT to change that information because we just do it internally,” Morton said.
Saini, who was vice president during the 2012-13 school year, asked senate for a contract with Reach Web Solutions, LLC to continue his work.
The contract was denied and the site was black for a few days until Saini put the site back up with the work he was compensated for—information from the 2012-13 school year.
Saini declined to comment on senate’s decision.
“Though we’ve had great results with students doing it in the past, (we want) the continuity that will come from the university upkeep,” said Adam Brown, chair of the Committee on the Budget.
Operating the site through the university will just be easier, he said.
“The mentality behind that is basically we can avoid incidents that were involved like with the contract dispute,” Brown said.
Concerns were cost of site incidentals, lack of a competitive search for someone to maintain the site and senate’s inability to formally agree on a legal contract, Brown said.
The body will still own the old Web domain until the contract runs out, but Student Senate President Nick Southall said he was unsure when that would be and how much it will cost.
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