Feature request: Bit Byte lineage tracker

[broad-well]

Proposal

As shown by our terminology around Bit Byte ancestry (with events like "Meet the Tree", named trees, and concern over one's dying tree), it seems that Bits and Bytes care a lot about their lineage. As the program grows exponentially, looking up the lineage and full structure of a tree organically can become daunting, especially for older graduates. For these challenges, I propose to build a Bit Byte lineage tracker as part of acmucsd.com. This tracker would store each Byte-to-Bit relationship and render each tree graphically for exploration, where users can find contact information for each member of the tree.

Background

There is deeper context to this request and my role as a stakeholder. I am a new Master's student here. At my undergrad institution (UMich), I was part of Living ArtsEngine, a living-learning community with first-year mentees assigned to (usually) second-year peer mentors. Since the program's founding in 2010, the staff and the students have kept tabulated records of these mentor-mentee assignments. When I was a peer mentor, I found that the most up-to-date family tree was being kept in FamilySearch.org, a service run by the Church of LDS. Since taking over stewardship of the tree, I have exported the data into a JSON file and worked with a couple other students to build an informed UX prototype for a family tree tracker presented here. We can use this prototype to inform our own UX design. Ideally, I want our lineage tracker to be available for other student organizations with mentorship programs to customize and host.

I am happy to contribute to development.