Technology-sharing among universities to fight DWI is urgent

In my Editor's Note this week, I wrote about CARPOOL, a non-profit campus organization at Texas A&M University that provides free rides so students can avoid the deadly mix of drinking and driving. My focus was on the homegrown technology behind the effort, and how that technology is being shared with other universities. In hindsight, I should have stressed the urgency of sharing it as efficiently and as broadly as possible.

On Monday, the American-Statesman newspaper in Austin reported that Lamarr Houston, a defensive tackle for the University of Texas Longhorns, was involved in a traffic accident and was arrested on a DWI charge just a few hours after the team's opening game of the season. According to the report, two Longhorn players were charged with driving while intoxicated at this time last year.

That report followed by just a couple of days an article in USA Today about a University of Texas study on extreme drinking, with a special focus on binges to mark 21^st birthdays. The four-year study of 2,200 UT students found that 40% of 21-year-old respondents admitted that they had driven after drinking in the preceding three months.

That, of course, is not to say that drunken driving is any more of a problem at UT than at Texas A&M or any other university. It's to UT's credit that a spotlight is being shown on the problem at that particular university in the form of such an exhaustive study. And it's noteworthy that these two schools, which constitute one of most intense college rivalries in the nation, are taking high-profile measures to address the DWI problem.

My Editor's Note pointed out that John-Michael Oswalt, Texas A&M class of 2007 and the technology guru behind CARPOOL, is eager to share that technology with other universities. He has licensed the "phone room" dispatching application he developed in ASP under a Creative Commons license that allows other universities to freely copy, share and modify the app. He even wrote a new version in PHP because he'd found that that language is more familiar to some of his counterparts at other schools.

Think how cool it would be if the University of Texas adopted the technology developed by its archrival. Such a move would no doubt draw widespread attention to efforts to expand the CARPOOL program nationwide, and would demonstrate that even the fiercest of rivals are on the same side when it comes to the things that are really important.