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Business Rules

Business rules refer to a series of guiding principles, directives, or instructions that outline specific company actions and, in some cases, limit or regulate certain operations. Their primary objective is to promote effective and consistent decisions, they are almost always put into place to ensure that better corporate actions can be taken. They contribute to an organization’s overall reliability, compliance, and consistency, and can represent both internal procedures and external regulations (Hubler.ai, 2023).

The business rules for the Clubs Connect application help define and clarify the structure of the application and they are as follows:

  • The University of the Witwatersrand (hereafter referred to as Wits University) is the institution for which the platform is developed. The platform is created for the university’s extracurricular activities in which students can participate in different clusters as an outlet to academic pressure (www.wits.ac.za, n.d.). the internal systems of Wits University operate as a black box to the application, meaning that their internal processes are not accessible or directly integrated.
  • An executive member, exec for short is a user who serves as a council representative who holds a designated portfolio. These include, but are not limited to: Chairperson, Deputy Chairperson, Secretary, Deputy Secretary, and other customizable roles based on the society or council’s specific needs.
  • An executive is added a member of the CSO they represent and is granted dedicated functionality and permissions within that CSO.
  • An SGO officer is a member of the Student Governance Office responsible for overseeing and supporting student-led clubs, societies, organizations, and councils.
  • A CSO (Clubs, Societies, and Organizations) refers to any registered body or organization within the system. This includes clubs, societies, councils, wits sports, Wits affiliated offices, such as STPU and CCDU.
  • Users are students or staff members who engage with CSOs on the application in various capacities, such as members, followers, or executive members.
  • A member of a CSO is a user who has paid a membership fee (for fee-based CSOs) or has accepted the CSO’s terms and conditions and meets its membership criteria (for non-fee-based CSOs). Example: CSAM Council may require users to be registered students within the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics.
  • A member is essentially a follower with additional access to CSO offerings, such as exclusive events or materials. For CSOs like school councils, where formal membership does not exist, any user who chooses to follow the CSO will also be treated as a member to ensure they receive the same level of access.
  • A follower is a user who opts to receive updates or stay informed about a specific CSO without holding formal membership.
  • CSOs that have been inactive for a continuous period exceeding five years may be permanently removed (deleted) from the database to optimize storage and maintain up-to-date records.
  • The SGO maintains a private page accessible only to registered CSOs. This page contains essential operational resources, such as banking details for processing donations, lists of approved vendors, potential partners or sponsors, and other governance related guidance and information.
  • CSOs can submit venue booking requests and financial statement requests through the application. These requests are sent directly to the relevant Wits University email addresses and as Wits University systems are a black box, any processes or approvals that occur after submission are not tracked or recorded within the application.
  • SGO officers are responsible for administrative duties such as creating or removing CSO pages, reviewing CSO activity, managing compliance and governance tasks.
  • All SGO officers are granted administrator-level access on the application, regardless of their specific departmental roles within the SGO, their individual departmental responsibilities are carried out outside the platform. These internal SGO processes operate as a black box to the application, meaning they are not visible or tracked within the system.
  • SGO Officers can add and remove members to/from CSOs. Since Wits systems operate as a black box to this application, we assume that the SGO maintains an up-to-date list of all CSO members. Officers are responsible for updating this list by adding new members when they subscribe and removing members when they cancel their subscription or when their subscription term ends.
  • Access to pages is restricted based on user role and membership status. Executives have access to the same pages as regular users but with additional functionality for managing their CSOs. SGO officers, acting as system administrators, have access to dedicated administrative pages with permissions to manage CSOs and oversee platform operations.