Response from email:

I’ve CC’d Zak Bell and Dan Black on this email, they know much more of the technical details than I, and I forgot to copy them on my original response, but I did forward it to them to bring them into the loop.

A brief history of the MyState app:

• The app began in the College of Engineering with a Senior Design Capstone Project, working with the Engineering Communications office (me)
• When that team’s project was finished, we hired an intern to polish and expand the app
• After a few iterations as an Engineering app, and after our intern moved on to grad school at Purdue, we partnered with the University IT/Web Development office
• We went from a single intern to a team of 6-10 developers, depending on the time of year
• The team is managed by ISU staff, who make ultimate decisions on features, and assist the student team with permissions for various resources to be made available in the app
• Our app does not generate any app-specific data, it is simply a mobile portal to resources already available
  • Some of the resources are owned by Iowa State University, such as the dining menus, events calendar, class schedules, testing centers, etc.
  • Some of the resources are generated by third-parties, such as the CyRide bus schedules, which are generated by the NextBus system used by CyRide

Now, to respond to your specific questions:

• Our student developers are hired and are required to work a minimum number of hours each week, and are allowed more hours during summer semester and breaks, regulated by university policy for student workers
• The team is co-managed by myself (engineering), Zak Bell, and Dan Black (IT), and is part of the web/mobile development team supervised by Jeff Sorensen (IT)
• The team is housed in the web-development area on campus, and we have weekly team meetings to discuss current progress and future development ideas
• The Iowa State CIO has deemed the app worthy of funding for the student employees and management’s time invested
• We provide workspace, computers and various testing devices for the student employees
• Developers usually have an Android or iOS “specialty” and work primarily on that platform, though we do have them work closely together to maintain parity in the two versions, as well as giving them a chance to learn more about the platform that is not their specialty
• The MyState app is wholly owned by Iowa State University
• University branding is used in the app, developers are made aware of branding guidelines, and we make sure everything they do is in compliance
• Continuity is not a problem, because the staff members overseeing the development team remain in place
• We attempt to hire developers as early along in their educational process as we can, so we can keep them in place and they can really make an impact and gain great experience as a part of the team