Outreach tracking, grant reporting
DOCENT — Outreach & Community Engagement Tracker
A self-hosted web app that helps a scientific community log outreach visits, visualize coverage on a map, and share resources.
What faculty used it for
DOCENT (Distributed Outreach & Community Engagement Network Tracker) lets a research community log every outreach visit — to grade schools, community colleges, museums, libraries, pubs, and beyond — in one shared record. Researchers register accounts and record each event’s venue, date, host, audience, attendance, and notes. The app provides a live analysis dashboard, a coverage map showing which nearby institutions have been reached (and which are gaps), and a reports tab that exports grant-ready summaries of collective Broad Impact over any date range as PDF, CSV, Markdown, or JSON.
Why it was useful
Keeping track of outreach across an entire research group is tedious and error-prone. DOCENT solves this by giving every member a shared platform to log visits and immediately see how the community’s engagement is growing. The map view highlights coverage gaps, helping target future outreach. When reporting season arrives, exporting a polished summary is a single click instead of weeks of spreadsheet archaeology.
The tool can run entirely on the community’s own server — no third-party cloud, no vendor with a copy of your records — making it straightforward to satisfy campus data-governance and FERPA obligations for any student-related information.
Claude was used for the implementation of the all-human-designed features, including the deployment model, cross-instance data-sharing, and the privacy model.