API: expose current school on people, and title/school-during-project on project people

[jonfroehlich]

Summary

The API exposes a person's current_title but not their school, and the project-people endpoint exposes a person's project role but not the title/school they held while on the project. Both are already on the Position model — this is a serializer change only, no new model fields and no migration.

Why

Project Sidewalk's new About page (ProjectSidewalk/SidewalkWebpage#4664) hydrates its whole team section from this API so the roster never has to be hand-maintained. Two things it can't render today:

1. Affiliations on the current-team cards. Right now a card can say "PhD Student" but not "University of Washington", so there's no way to show "Easterseals" for Judy Shanley or "University of Illinois Chicago" for Yochai Eisenberg. On a page that describes Project Sidewalk as a UW + UIC collaboration, unlabeled affiliations are a real gap.
2. Credentials in the all-contributors roll call. The page names all ~150 people who have contributed, and we want each annotated with what they were at the time — "Undergrad, UMD", "High School Student, UW". This is the experiential-learning story the section exists to tell.

For (2) the current title is the wrong value: a 2015 undergraduate's profile now shows whatever they do today. It has to be the title held during that project stint.

The About page degrades gracefully — every one of these renders nothing when absent — so there's no breakage today and no rush. It just stays less informative until these land.

Proposed changes

Both use existing model helpers, so the implementation is a few lines each.

1. PersonSerializer — add current_school

Person.get_current_school is already a cached_property sitting right next to get_current_title, which the serializer already exposes. Mirroring it:

current_school = serializers.SerializerMethodField()

def get_current_school(self, obj):
    # Person.get_current_school is a cached_property, not a method.
    return obj.get_current_school

Adding current_department alongside it would be free (Person.get_current_department exists too) — useful to others even if the About page doesn't need it.

2. ProjectRoleSerializer — add title and school_abbreviated

ProjectRole already carries person, start_date, and end_date, so the matching Position is the person's position overlapping that stint. Position already has title (from the Title choices) and get_school_abbreviated().

The Title choices are exactly the vocabulary the roll call wants — High School Student, Undergrad, MS Student, PhD Student, Post doc, Research Scientist, Professor, and so on.

The abbreviation matters for the roll call specifically: it's a dense 3-column name list, so "UMD" works where "University of Maryland" would wrap every entry.

Where a stint spans multiple positions (an undergrad who stayed on for an MS), picking the one that overlaps the start of the project role seems most faithful to "what they were when they joined" — but I don't have a strong opinion, and whatever's most natural for the model is fine.

Field naming

I've matched the existing API conventions (current_title → current_school; Position.title → title). Happy to consume whatever names you prefer — just say so on this issue and I'll adjust the consumer, which is a one-line change on our side.

Consumer

public/js/aboutPage.js in ProjectSidewalk/SidewalkWebpage, covered by test/js/aboutPage.test.js, which pins the payload shapes of /api/v1/projects/sidewalk/people/, /api/v1/people/<url_name>/, /api/v1/projects/sidewalk/publications/, and /api/v1/projects/sidewalk/grants/. If any of those shapes change, those tests are where it'll surface.

Unrelated data-entry note

Two small things I noticed while integrating, both fixable in the admin rather than in code:

• The per-project role is blank for 7 of the 9 people currently active on Project Sidewalk, so their role line falls back to current_title — which is why the page reads "Director" for Judy Shanley rather than anything about her role on the project.
• At least one grant has the literal string "None" as its grant_id (a leaked Python None), which the About page special-cases so it doesn't render "(#None)".

[jonfroehlich]

Implemented on 1426-api-position-title-school. Two deviations from the proposal, plus a bug found along the way.

Field names — position_*, not a bare title

The project-people record already has a free-text role (the editor-written description of the work), so title sitting next to it was ambiguous. Final shape:

{
  "person": { ... },
  "role": "Led the accessibility audit tooling",
  "lead_project_role": "Student Lead",
  "position_title": "Undergrad",
  "position_school": "University of Maryland",
  "position_school_abbreviated": "UMD",
  "start_date": "2015-06-01",
  "end_date": "2017-05-31",
  "is_active": false
}

Full position_school ships alongside the abbreviation so the consumer can pick per context (cards vs. the dense roll call). All three are null for someone with no Position on record — a real case here (several external collaborators on Sidewalk have a ProjectRole but no Position).

On /api/v1/people/<url_name>/: current_school and current_department, exactly as proposed.

Which position gets picked

"Overlaps the start" needed an explicit rule with a fallback, since roles that predate a person's recorded positions are common in the older data. ProjectRole.get_position_during_role(), in order:

1. the latest-starting position whose range contains the role's start_date;
2. else the latest position that had already begun by then (role started in a gap);
3. else the earliest position (role predates every position — data drift);
4. None only if the person has no positions at all.

Verified against a prod snapshot: Jon's 2012 Sidewalk role now reports Assistant Professor / UMD rather than Professor / UW.

get_school_abbreviated was broken for one-word affiliations

It acronyms anything that isn't UW/UMD, so "Easterseals" → "E" (and "Cornell" → "C", which our People page renders today). Fixed at the source — a name that would acronym to a single letter is returned unchanged — so this fixes the public People page too, not just the API. "University of Illinois Chicago" → "UIC" is unaffected.

Performance

Resolving a position per role would have been ~150 extra queries on the roll call. Both project sub-resources now prefetch_related("person__position_set"), and the people list prefetches position_set (which also fixes a pre-existing N+1 behind current_title). A test pins the query count as flat across roster size — without the prefetch it goes 11 → 21 for 10 extra people.

The data-entry notes

Both are data, not code, so they're admin fixes rather than part of this change — the blank per-project role on the active Sidewalk people, and the grant whose grant_id is the literal string "None". I'd rather fix that one row than teach the serializer to special-case the string.