This organization will surely change over the passage of time, however, it is important to set forth a list of founding values and missions that it was created with in mind. While these are just the values of the handful of students that created the organization, it may be helpful to make reference to these as guiding principles when making decisions regarding the future of the organization. It is important to remember that these should be open to flexibility as the organization grows and changes, but that this is where we got our start.

Mission and Goals

“Whereas students often lack tools that assist in their academic and career success; whereas students benefit from applying their knowledge outside of the classroom; and whereas there should be a place to learn and have fun while building tools for the community, we establish the Nebula Labs organization to build and maintain tools that help students, to foster an interdisciplinary and welcoming community, and to teach the community what we learn”

- From the Preamble of the Nebula Labs Constitution

The mission of Nebula Labs has had and should always have the development of tools to assist the student body of UT Dallas (or other interested student bodies) at its heart. The organization’s founding members, dissatisfied with the software tools offered by the University and knowing that with the University’s reputation for technically talented individuals, set out to make a suite of tools for use by the student body to improve student life in all aspects.

In this mission, the organization should resolve itself to build tools that assist students in their academic, social, and personal lives while they are in college to make the most of the experiences and opportunities available to them while they are here at UTD.

In that vein, we believe that working as a part of Nebula Labs and teaching what we have learned is one such opportunity that we can offer to improve student life directly. This means that the organization, while its primary focus is development, should also be focused on the personal development of its membership and should consider how its work can be used to better the personal and professional lives of its members. In the words of our first President

“We build products and people”

-Ryan Radloff

Values

Open Source

Nebula Labs was created primarily by Computer Scientists and Engineers that passionately believe in the principles of Free and Open Source Software. By keeping our code open source, we prevent recreating the issues that initially inspired us to start the organization - primarily the lack of access to data and improve the platforms that are offered by the University.

This Open Source mentality should extend to all aspects of our development and internal processes. For example - these Officer documents are available to all members. Likewise, members should stay informed of the fact that they are entitled to visit any officer and leadership meetings as well, so long as they are not disruptive of business.

It was also implemented early in the organization to apply to all of our data ownership. We spent years collecting the datasets that we now have access to and have no desire to keep that data from the student body any longer. Our API is and should remain easily accessible to all students regardless of their membership to our organization.

Students as Primary Stakeholders

As stated in the mission of the organization, the organization’s focal point ought to be on the student body. That does not mean that there are no other external stakeholders that may need to be considered. One of the other major stakeholders in our work is the University itself as well as its administrators. We may also need to consider third party corporate stakeholders as the organization continues to grow. This value is not to say that the interests of those parties is not to be considered, but that the interests of students come first.

If University administrators seek to gain something that is against the best interests of students, we ought to side with the students regardless of what strategic gains may be made from siding with administrators. If corporate stakeholders seeks something that compromises the vision of a product or interferes with typical operation of the organization, we ought to side with the interests of membership regardless of potential financial benefits may be found.

We should always seek to fulfill the interests of students, and by proxy our membership first, and then consider the needs of other stakeholders.

Industry Standards

One of the primary goals of the organization is to assist in the professional development of our membership. This means that all of the deliverables created by our teams ought to be held up to and compared to industry standards and developed through industry processes using industry tools. Not only does this assist in offering our membership the experience that they need to be prepared to enter the workforce, it also upholds our other values of creating maintainable, well crafted products that can stand the test of time.

This includes but is not limited to following coding, design, and product standards set forth by their Division Heads. This also means that there must be opportunities for the members to learn these standards, however.

Maintainability

One of the key things to consider when working on the development within our organization when compared to other organizations at UTD is the type of development that we seek to accomplish. Many other organizations also offer “projects” to their membership. However, these projects are never intended to be used by anyone and are often forgotten after a single semester or continually overhauled and refactored without any long term planning.

On the other hand, our organization is seeking to create long standing platforms with a large user base that relies upon us to offer a consistent, reliable, and excellent experience. This means we aren’t given the luxury of releasing code and overhauling our code base on a regular basis. Releases should be carefully considered, and only contain code that we are certain is safe, stable, and in line with previous user experiences as to avoid alienating previous users.

All of this is to say that our projects must be written with maintainability at their core. Holding to industry standards will greatly assist in this, but considering maintainability when setting forth standards and selecting tools is important and worthy of its own mention.

Minimizing Overhead and Organizational Bloat

One of the major values that resulted in the creation of Nebula Labs as an independent organization was the fact that organization and administrative bloat was resulting in a disjoint set of priorities from our original parent organization. We should learn from this lesson and ensure that we do not fall into the same pitfalls. The Board of Directors and Officer team has been established explicitly as a small team with defined roles and powers to ensure that the administrative and middle management tasks are kept to a minimum and that the organization can be enabled to focus on its primary missions of personal and software development.

Inclusive and Inviting Environment

Nebula Labs is a highly technical organization that is and will likely continue to be dominated by individuals who are extremely talented in their respective fields if it is to succeed. That being said, it is important to remember that our field of study is rampant with imposter syndrome and lots of unrealized potential. Many talented individuals are often pushed out of organizations like our own by a vocal minority of elitists and it is our goal to foster an environment where all members are able to show off their skills and where we can leverage those talents.

If cliques and elitist mentalities begin to take form within the organization, it is in the best interest of both individuals and the organization to break them up and create a more healthy culture.

This extends especially so to disadvantaged communities and demographics that are underrepresented in our disciplines as these concerns are exaggerated to those who may already feel as though they “do not belong”

That being said, the organization does rely upon a certain level of selectivity to be properly upkept. High quality code comes from high quality engineers and that goes for our designers and product members as well. Rather, our emphasis should be on finding highly motivated individuals. If members are motivated and have bought into our organizational values, they will become high value members of our teams regardless of their initial skill level. Again harkening back to a quote from our original officers

“We seek those who are either highly skilled or highly motivated members”