Organization of online resources- needs work?

[Nancy O.]

Originally Posted by rtfgnow

The main problem with what you suggested would be the amount of memery needed to store it, not to mention bandwith and the amount of traffic it would get. Also we could easily have things double posted or some bot spam it with useless uploads.

I think the bandwidth and memory for all these documents would pale in comparison to hosting hundreds of video segments, which is already being done. So I don't think that should be the issue. Or at least, we're only working in theory right now :) But valid points that would need to be worked out no matter what.

Originally Posted by synth3tk

I do agree that after some thought, it can be daunting. My suggestion? Make great use of the FIRST Wiki.
http://wiki.chiefdelphi.com/index.php/Main_Page

Yes, I've seen FIRSTwiki, and that could work. The way mediawiki manages versions of files seems nice. But it seems right now people only use it to update their own team pages AFAIK. It's been there for years, but it never seems to have gained momentum :(

Originally Posted by RoboMom

NEMO has also been thinking about this challenge and is working on a first draft, trying to organize a list to help (at least for FRC for 2009). What I am trying to figure out is which categories make sense so it's just not a long list. Any suggestions?

Ideally it wouldn't be listed under categories but rather tags, which are much more flexible. But in the interim before we get a good solution, I think the categories on http://firstdev.wpi.edu/cgi-bin/index.cgi?n=Portal are pretty good:

* Portal
* Competitions
* Electrical
* Fundraising
* Leadership
* Mechanical
* Outreach
* Programming

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Don't worry, just hold tight; there's projects in the pipeline to address these issues.

May I join in? Because I've done a lot of thinking on this, and am curious as to what ideas others have. I just don't want to be reinventing the wheel :)

A possible idea as suggested by a fellow team member (Tanner @CD) is to create some sort of webapp around del.icio.us [feeds or api]. In this case, creating a delicious account specifically for this purpose, and using the api to create a webpage where (probably registered) users can submit links and descriptions to that one account. What this removes is the popularity function, so no easy way to sort quality of links (or perhaps, rate using "star" tags e.g. "***" as a tag?). Team #s can be implemented like CD-media does, same for revision date, etc. And if wanted to, could do tags like "category_Programming". And same for licensing ("license_Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic"? ). There'd be a lot of kinks, like how to protect against malicious users (how do we ensure that that really is the correct license?). Brainstorming out loud here.

However, ideally for me, we could let the document originators or just helpful souls manually extract the data from all these documents and stick them online so I don't have to download the files (and thereby forget where I got them) in the first place.

Yes, this is coming from someone has almost zilch programming experience, and no, I'm not content to just hold tight and wait. :) Inefficiency like this (not being able to quickly discern which resources are well-executed or up-to-date and find new resources) annoys me.