2025 Intern report – Maya

Introduction

Hello, my name is Maya and I am an intern with Socialis for Summer 2025. I am from Indianapolis, Indiana, USA and am a senior/4th year student at Indiana University, studying Cybersecurity & Global Policy with minors in Economics and Informatics. While I am in Japan, I will also try to pick up some Japanese, but we shall see!

Project overview

For my time here in Japan over the summer, I am researching and developing rough ideas for a communication platform that Socialis can use internally through their company in order to keep communication and sharing secure between their employees.

So far, I have written up features that a communication platform needs to have in order for it to be valuable to the company. This includes, direct messaging, group messaging, large file sharing, task planner, and group calendar. There may be more features that may also be necessary to add, but these are the main ones I think are important for a successful communication platform.

I have then gone into each feature and broke down how each feature works typically. This included the type of data transmission it should use, structure and other security features it should have. I wrote out some basic pseudocode using python syntax to get a better picture of how each aspect would look like. I have so far only done this for direct messaging and group messaging and am hoping to get started on the task manager feature.

I have also been researching the best communication platform Socialis can use in the meantime that fits the company’s needs and restrictions. I believe Trello, which is what the company already uses, is the best platform as it allows for many of the features that Socialis is looking for. I still need to play around with all the features to best see how the platform can be used and how to get the most out of it.

Lastly, I will be writing blog posts every two weeks about my findings and what I have been up to during my time with Socialis! I am excited for these next couple of weeks and to help create a solution with my fellow interns to help the company operate more efficiently. I will try to talk about a new aspect each post and why I think it will be beneficial.