I’m about to start work on a super-awesome web app for FIRST teams. It would be a portal that allows all students, mentors, engineers, parents, and lab rodents to exchange information easily and keep up with team happenings.
Currently, I’m going to give it the following features:
Members: Team members can sign up (probably with mentor acceptance required to prevent espionage and spam) and enter data about themselves, like Role (high school student, college mentor, engineer, parent, lab rodent), Groups (see below), and contact information (AIM, email, etc…).
(Note: the Role of “lab rodent” would be similar to “toading” a player on a MUD–it would allow them to log in but make their account useless. Mostly a security/prank feature…)
Groups: Groups are arbitrary categorizations of people for various purposes. The obvious (and intended) use is subteams, such as Strategy, Programming, Drivetrain, etc…, but it also doubles as a way to help organize teams with multiple schools. My team, for example, is composed of about 5 high schools, so having individual schools as groups would allow communication about school-specific issues (permission slips, robot demos, etc…) without bothering the whole team. It could also be similarly used for mentors from the same company to work together.
News: Mentors and possibly team members could post news items.
Events: A calendar that can hold team meetings, important dates (ship date will probably be pre-programmed, and it might just decide to find out when all the regionals are), and other stuff
Tasks: A very capable to-do list that can hold jobs to be done. A possible feature in later versions would be sub-tasks, so “Ship robot” could be composed of all the steps required to build the bot. This would be especially useful if I give it the ability to assign a person to a task. Then anyone with help or questions related to the task knows who to contact.
Messages: Private or public messaging to communicate about random stuff.
That’s pretty much it, with a nice home page to show relevant snippets of each section and a sidebar to jump to different sections. Later versions might include plug-ins like a Parts section that allows people to request, authorize, and check out parts, and keep track of what goes on the robot. Most people would kill for this, but remember, a dead programmer writes no code.
I have a quick post about it on my blog:
http://home.earthlink.net/~thinkinginbinary/2004/05/idea-for-first-portal.html
Please post comments there, or copy your replies there, so people who visit my blog can hear about it too.
See ya,
Tom
(I want a BRB!)