CSC 322.01, Class 04: Approaching projects
Overview
- Preliminaries
- Notes and news
- Upcoming work
- Extra credit
- Questions
- GPCF
- Mayflower
- Local Foods Connection
- PALS
- Callisto
- Heartland Global Health Consortium
- A bit of time to rank
Admin
- Our goal for today is to go over the projects and help you think about which ones might be appropriate for you.
- It appears that there was some confusion on the assignment for today.
Upcoming work
- Continue to work on your résumé; you’ll be bringing it to class Thursday.
- Three interesting challenges for each of the six projects.
- Three interesting opportunities for each of the six projects.
Good things to do
Academic
- CS Table today: Doxxing.
- Rosenfield symposium, this week. (Lots of different events)
Misc
- Community Hour (Dialogues Across Difference), Today at 11 a.m. in JRC 101.
- CLS Kick-Off Event, Tuesday at 11 a.m. in North Campus Grove.
- Les Duke
Questions
GPCF
- Goal: Finish three projects that are mostly done and get them in the
clients’ hand.
- Volunteer coordination (different than PALS)
- Board bank
- Grant management
- Involves some coding (and re-coding), a lot of working with the client to make sure that their needs are really met, a bit of support, some interesting sysadmin stuff (how do we really deploy), etc.
Opportunities
- Learning how to handle a codebase that is (almost) finished
- I find the GPCF project interesting because hopefully we would be able to fully implement our work and see it in its final state.
- Creating a website that directs people to different databases according to their needs
- Include database people looking for volunteers
- Automatically suggests match between volunteers and people looking for volunteers according to listed expertise and skills, and needs
- To finish projects that are near completion
- Gives experience with database building
- To build on the tail-end of others’ work
Challenges
- The GPCF project presents some difficulties because there are quite a few projects that are close to implementation, which means navigating and learning other peoples code.
- Working with the legacy codes on the projects near implementation phase
- Introducing and advertising the databases to the community
- For Grant Database: Migrating grant information online would be a very long, manual process
- Same issue of privacy as in Mayflower
- Issue of maintenance
- As Sam said, the last little bit can be the hardest part
- Multiple projects to work on
- Because almost finished, lots of old code to parse through
Other notes
Mayflower
- Goal: Finish the directory
- Goal: Start whatever comes next in the Web of Mayflower (WoM)
Opportunities
- I find the Mayflower project interesting because the software would be used by people who most likely have had minimal experience with computers in the past, so a focus of the project would be accessibility.
- Implement a keyword search so that the website automatically finds people with commonalities through keywords
- Creating a simple edit page so that residents can edit the contact information easily
- Creating an event section to share and communicate posts on any events around the community
- Hopefully be able to work with the volunteers of the Mayflower community
- Experience with mid-project design
- Experience with privacy-related topics
- Directly helping people
Challenges
- Initial registering of the contact information (photo, address, phone number, email, etc) on the server, if it is not already gathered, would be a long process
- Teaching 150-200 residents about the features and how to use it. Kathryn says “Not our job”
- Communicating with the stand-in folks in the east coast about the project
- Digitizing the already already available phone numbers
- Concern of whether the directory can somehow be accessed by telemarketers
- Accessibility for people who may be unfamiliar with technology
- Specialized topics (privacy, etc.)
- Coming in midway
- Needs to be designed for non-tech-savvy individuals
Other notes
Local Foods Connection
- Goal: Build web site to support “local foods to local needs”, focus
on geo-based visualizations of where the food is coming from.
- Education value
- Fundraising value
- Grantwriting value
Opportunities
- Creating a communicating space on the website so that consumers can contact local farmers
- Posting updates about local farming community
- Creating events between local community and farmers to raise awareness
- More directly helping people in need
- Experience to work closely with web design
- Specified skills (maps, etc.) to learn
Challenges
- Building the geo-searhcable database
- How (and if) to allow others to contribute to this database
- Since the focus is lower-income people, they may not have the same level of access to the website
- Connecting the complex search engine with map would be interesting but also challenging
- It may take more than a semester to finish the website, and thus documenting the code and keeping a log of things to be updated would be important
- The website will be useful only when people in the community use it. Thus, it would be essential to inform and advertise the people about the features the website provides
- Specified skills (maps, etc.) must be learned
- Also start from scratch Many goals wrapped in one, less specific focus
Other notes
- A chance to think about how best to visualize the data and other stuff.
- Will it be accessible / how big an audience? Sam thinks valuable.
PALS
- Goal: Make it easier to manage volunteers
Opportunities
- Add work description section so that volunteers can sign up for work they wish to do
- Include various pictures and information about the animals to raise awareness
- Post car pool services if there are any people going on same direction
- Learning how to start from scratch
- Experience with preliminary design meetings
- Relatively simple software (not saying easy to make, but simple to comprehend)
Challenges
- Collecting the volunteer information without discouraging them with complex procedure is important
- It would be nice to have a reminder system that checks with the signed up volunteers so that if they cannot make it, volunteers in the waitlist can be contacted beforehand
- Implementing a smart scheduler system so that volunteers in the waitlist can be contacted for any other empty spots to make sure animals are supported 365 days per year.
- Starting from scratch
- No prior work or ideas to rely on
- Not going to see the project completed, probably not even recognizable as a product
Other notes
- Do we have to interact with the animals/volunteer?
- Probably not/no.
- The GPCF Volunteer Thingy will provide you with a starting resource for you to think about.
Peer Advocates / Callisto
- System for confidentially recording sexual assault (or similar issues)
- Kind of scary that we’re doing this
- Python/Django
- Some indirect contact with the developers
- Will it be installed if we build it? Almost certainly.
Opportunities
- The deep encryption system it will be interacting with
- Real impact that I can see it having on the Grinnell college community.
- Implementing different ways to report or file an incident
- Creating an anonymous community post place where people can talk or express their feelings
- Allowing individual password protected page so that they can file or withdraw their reporting at anytime without privacy concerns
- Supporting OSS (If I heard correctly). (Sam says: “Yes”)
- Working with the people of the CRSSJ.
- Again, more directly helping people
- Experience starting a project
- Needs to be user-friendly in design, emphasized
Challenges
- I think the peer advocates project would be challenging because of the back end system that it would be interacting with, it would mean learning a new system with an unknown level of usability/documentation.
- Issue of privacy: will we have to deal with information that may identify students who file reports?
- Finding required documentation on Callisto
- If it is hosted with a third party, whether that third party can be trusted that information.
- Privacy and permission issue on who has access to the database for reported incidents. (Sam says No one! All data should be transmitted and stored in encrypted form.)
- Deciding on how much information is required for reporting an incident through the system (Sam says: This may already be in place.)
- Working with part of the interactive online platform that already exists
- Very specific work, needs to be fairly precise
- Just starting fresh
- Very somber topic, not going to be so enjoyable to work with
- Python on Django rather than Ruby on Rails.
Other notes
Heartland Global Health Consortium
Opportunities
- Allow read only permission and provide website information to other college students to raise awareness about global health
- Link various global health related website so that visitors and members can access more resources if they wish to
- Create a back-up system so that all changes are documented and no data are lost in the process
- Experience in website design
- More national/global perspective
- Thinking about robustness through changing of users/administrators
Challenges
- I think the heartland global health consortium would a challenging project overall because it would be working with large amounts of data
- It seems like the partner does not have a super clear idea of what she is looking for, all in all it seems super open-ended.
- Maintaining permissions on changing the website among the administration
- Overcoming the institutional barriers and allowing all members to post on the website
- Working with the existing website (code base)
- Finding a hosting provider
- Multiple aspects
- First Grinnellians to work on it, but outsiders did, so possible difficulties entering in
- Very broad terms
Other notes
- Open-ended means that you can probably take it where you want it. That’s a good opportunity.
- A chance for you to transform thinking.
- Good for people okay with big risk/big gain.
- Opportunity to think about how to migrate data (from their old site, from the rapidly disappearing governement Web sites)
- May be having to satisfy a variety of people, but only have contact with one.
- Do we have access to the other stuff?