What is Grouve?

Grouve is an event planning application that empowers event hosts and planners, and allows attendees to have a say in the events they plan. Grouve is currently under active development.

I'm working on Grouve with Matt Sichterman, Peyton Tanzillo, Sam Neupane, Wyatt Chandler, Maggie Harder, Joey Ballentine, Easton Joachimsen, and Ethan Bütt. Check out their profiles!

Why are we building it?

The 9 of us have been working on projects together all throughout our time in university. We've all shared concepts, ideas, even tears throughout studies, and always wondered what could become if we ever had the chance to all work together towards something. Well, that something is Grouve.

Along with that, part of the curriculum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is that, as a software engineering major, you complete two full years of senior design before you are eligible for graduation. At the end of our first year of senior design, our group of students saw plenty of room for improvement within the curriculum.

Senior design works like this: at the start of the year, industry comes in and pitches to you, the student, why you should work on their project for a year. After that, students are randomly paired to projects within their preference sheet, and voila, a randomized team of about 6-10 students has been assigned to an industry sponsor.

But we had already completed a year of that, and our 9 members had a new idea to pitch: what if, instead of working with an industry sponsor, we got to sponsor our own project and create a brand new software system from the ground up?

Process

We got the ball rolling for how SOFTie Startup, as we dubbed it, might work towards the end of our junior year, as we were all completing our first iteration of senior design. Through months of discussion, presentation, and polish, we were able to convince senior design faculty to pilot our SOFTie Startup program for the 2020-2021 academic year, with the goal in mind of designing a framework for future software engineering students to come.

In the beginning, we were lucky enough to be able to partner up with Lincoln's very own Don't Panic Labs in researching our four ideas for the SOFTie Startup and working to learn which one was most viable in our ever-changing world. Once we wrapped out the business research phase of our project, we were ready to start wireframing up our ideas, working on defining our business, and got started on implementation!

More to come...