STARNET is the digital hub of an organization that accredits programs in the social sciences and humanities. Universities submit their applications here, evaluation teams write their reports here, and board decisions and official letters are generated here.
Accrediting a program is a months-long journey between the dean’s office, the department, the evaluation team, student and industry representatives, committees and the board. Every step has its own documents, approvals and deadlines; in a process run over email and file sharing, it was easy to lose track of what was waiting on whom.
A configurable workflow engine driven by step templates that administrators define. Each step has an input type, role-based view and edit permissions, a deadline and a two-stage approval. Board decisions and assignment letters are generated from templates, evaluation reports go through an AI pre-review, and notifications go out by email and SMS based on rules.
The institution applies through a public form, its email is verified, and the application moves into review.
The program prepares its self-assessment report in the system, together with its evidence.
The team chair, evaluators, and student and industry representatives are assigned; conflict-of-interest declarations are collected.
A day-by-day visit plan is prepared; pre-visit and post-visit reports are written.
Decisions and assignment letters are generated from templates and go through institution and administrator approval.
The accreditation certificate and its validity period are recorded, and the process is archived.
Administrators define the step templates: input type (file, date, report, survey, generated document), role-based view and edit permissions, and deadline. Changes to a template also apply to applications already in progress.
Every step is approved first by the institution, then by an administrator. Board decisions are generated from Word templates and reports from HTML to PDF; documents are protected with a watermark.
Team chairs, evaluators, and student and industry evaluators are assigned by faculty and program; incomplete teams are flagged, and the assignment letter is ready in one click.
The admin dashboard shows work awaiting approval and how programs are spread across process steps. Every list can be filtered and exported to Excel.
The main views on the administrator side. Screenshots were taken with anonymized data; the organization’s logo and name are hidden.
A single Spring Boot service: each application gets its own copy of a step template, and every step defines its type, duration and which roles can view and edit it. Notifications are queued in the same transaction as the business record, and a separate job sends them with retries. The AI review runs in the background and notifies the evaluator when it finishes.
External serviceInterfaces for institutions, evaluators and administrators
Next.js
React
MUIWorkflow engine, audit trail and schema management
Java 25
Spring Boot 4
Spring Security
Flyway
Hibernate Envers
MySQLBoard decisions, letters and reports
Files, notifications and AI
AWS S3Shared Jekirdek Teknoloji infrastructure
Docker
Traefik
GitHub Actions
Prometheus
Sentry
