Open-source all digital systems

Anonymous submitted on

Monday 26th December 2022

Complete

The SUSU website is one of the most terrifying systems I have ever used. Just from external observations, I can see signs of potential security issues, and if I prodded further I wouldn’t be surprised with what I found - it really doesn’t surprise that the entire SUSU database was publicly accessible a few years ago. 

As SUSU’s digital systems are not commercially sensitive - the Union is a registered charity, not a for-profit organisation - it makes perfect sense for everything to be open source. This allows external accountability and auditing of the codebase (for free), external bug fixes/feature contributions (for free), can help with talent acquisition for the development team, can take advantage of advanced security scanning tools that are often free for open-source projects (GitHub is one example), can give students confidence in a platform that is perceived to be very poor, and it also means that code which has no reason to be private can be rightfully put into the public domain. 

The Union’s code is already stored in Git repositories - switching them to being public rather than private would generally take less than 30 seconds - although if it isn’t already stored on GitHub then migrating/mirroring the repo to the platform would be a good thing to do to keep within the spirit of putting it in the public domain. 


Responses

Here, you can view the complete set of official responses from the sabbatical officers regarding this submission.

Oliver Murray replied on

Monday 9th Jan 2023 5:02pm

Hi,

Thank you for your submission!

I've passed this request onto our digital team who are currently working on upgrading our website with security and other concerned programmes being reviewed as part of our overall digital project portfolio. In particular, work such as this will be spearheaded by our PHP Developer position which is currently out for recruitment here: https://www.susu.org/work-with-us/about/405/php-developer.html

This request will be considered as part of our digital plans as we continue to upgrade our services. 

I am going to close this submission now. If you have any further questions please feel free to make another submission or email me directly at president@soton.ac.uk

All the best,

Oliver Murray

Union President 2022-2023

Actions

  • Forwarded to Union President

    Friday 6th Jan 2023 9:36am


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