Finding the best group messaging platform to stay connected and to collaborate with peers in a hybrid and online system has many hurdles. To alleviate some of the stresses of finding a viable intra-educational platform, three Stevens students developed babb.io, a group messaging platform designed specifically for Stevens students to collaborate on classwork and other group activities at Stevens.
Michael Ruffolo (3/4 Mechanical Engineer), Ali Alobaidi (2/4 Software Engineer), and Hayden Daly (3/3 Software Engineer) are co-founders of the babb.io platform. For the developers, “babb.io was built to create communities that promote academic development, communication and collaboration throughout college.” The co-founders mentioned that babb.io was “inspired by the surprising struggle of trying to communicate & stay up to date with students in mutual courses.” GroupMe is one of the many popular messaging platforms widely used by Stevens students. Usually, students are left to reach out to mutual friends to send them course-specific group chat links or are left in the dark as to whom among their peers could help them with classwork. According to the team’s experience, “more than half of the class [continues] without knowledge of the group [chat]” depriving students of supportive, educational environments.
For those curious about the unique name of the platform, the team mentioned that an io domain is “a common domain used within developer communities” and allowed them to create a platform name that will “stick out to Stevens students.” Babbio Center, specifically Babbio Atrium, is a popular hangout spot for many Stevens students to host organization events.
There are three main features that differentiate babb.io from other popular group messaging apps. Upon creating an account, students have the ability to join pre-made course-specific group chats available in the current semester. The babb.io team’s vision with their platform is to “help students pass classes and decrease the friction in communicating with classmates.” In their opinion, “GroupMe sucks, Canvas isn’t great for communication, and overall there was nothing that fully addressed [students’] problems.” Therefore, with established course group chats, users can connect with everyone in the course through one platform.
Second, the platform encourages user anonymity and lacks any form of an administrative role in the creation and management of a group chat. These group chats are unique because in babb.io “no one manages the group or decides who is allowed to join which is required in Slack, WhatsApp, GroupMe, etc.” With user anonymity in mind, babb.io doesn’t preview who is in any given group. Users have the option to present their desired display name or interact in a group chat as Anonymous.
After selecting their course-specific group chats, the user also has the ability to create or join other public or private group chats on campus. Students have the ability to develop group chats for personalized group projects and other special interest groups on campus. Likewise, users have the ability to act anonymously in this environment as well.
Third, they offer Superuser support for Stevens courses. Superusers, according to the co-founders, are “students/alumni that are privately vetted by the babb.io team.” The vetting process ensures that the Superuser has received an A in the course, is knowledgeable about the course, and is capable of offering appropriate guidance to users. They currently have a few Superusers for some courses on the platform.
They offer other convenience based features such as “threads, reactions, and multi-file support.”
For Stevens students concerned about the privacy of babb.io as a new platform, the co-founders stress that they are working to ensure that all users’ data is encrypted and is end-user friendly. The co-founders have mentioned that they are “actively working with a legal team to best protect the privacy of [their] users and plan on adding further encryption/privacy to the tech stack in the coming months. No data is accessible to any 3rd parties and is encrypted.” The only personal data that is stored by babb.io is the user’s email address and display name. Likewise, the user’s display name does not have to be their real name.
In order to provide a streamlined service to the users, the developers use “a mixture of popular cloud providers (Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services).” To their knowledge, these cloud providers “do not have access to any data on their end” and any data shared to babb.io is encrypted by their database provider. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform support many well-known public and private sector enterprises. These services are trusted platforms for many developers like the babb.io team.
While the team has the resources to branch out to other universities, they want to focus on having the platform be as impactful as possible to the Stevens community. Following their beta (initial) release of babb.io, they “made the decision to rebuild a large amount of the infrastructure to allow for a larger suite of features.” According to the co-founders, “due to our naturally agile methods of development, the current release is also a testing/feedback collection stage.” This means that they are looking for more Stevens students to join the platform, providing critical feedback to make it better, and ensuring users are finding value in the platform. They are looking towards a “much improved application” with a large release to multiple schools for the upcoming fall semester.
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