How will I do this project :
The goal of the project is to create a web portal for discussions and sessions to get ideas and answers to important questions in Smalltalk community. The portal should allow :
- real time discussion of the ideas (along with ensuring the anonymity of idea proposers)
- voting to get-out the best ideas
- seek consensus to get a result on discussions as close as possible to 100% agreement rather than having a 51/49 % case.
- analyze and publish the results as graphs and reports
What will determine that the project is successful or not : If the portal is able to provide the real-time discussion, voting facility and able to display the results in an organized manner, it would be quite successful according to me. Also, along with the above features, if it seeks consensus to get avoid 51/49% decisions and anonymity of the idea proposers is also ensured, it can be said to be 100% successful. Failing to achieve either of anonymity, real-time discussion or publishing the results would certainly be a failure of the project.
I would like to divide the whole project into 2 divisions. The first division will be accomplishing the following milestones:
- Have a real time discussion on various issues
- A voting system to work out the best of the ideas proposed.
- Seek consesus of the people to get a more unanimously supported idea.
The second division will be mainly enhancing and integrating features in a proper manner:
- Publishing the results as graphs and reports.
- Integrating all the features, which includes developing the portal with its various tabs and organizing it. Also, there should be a database which shall have a record of all the previous discussions and results. Also, if time permits, I would try to provide the results as a PDF.
What methodologies will I use :
The portal will be comprising of a basic CSS layout with all other features integrated with it. The features, as mentioned earlier, will be the real time discussion, voting and results. The most essential part for this portal will be AIDA, which is a Smalltalk web application framework. Thus, working with AIDA obviously requires a good hand on smalltalk. I am a new user to smalltalk, but I have been learning it at a good pace. Recently, I went through a course of University of Bern on smalltalk and that has helped me a lot. The coding is supposed to start on 24th May, so this gives me a good amount of time window till then to increase my knowledge on smalltalk.
Also, learning some of the features of AIDA till then will straight away be a part of the work to be done in summers, for instance implementing the AJAX and Comet(integrated features of AIDA). I will be using them to have the real time discussions among the people. As far as the generation of the graphs(results) is concerned, I will use the WebLiveImage component where the image is dynamically generated which is what we require. For the organization of the archives, I will use the version support offered by AIDA which shouldn't be much of a problem.
Suggested timeline and milestones :
First one or two weeks : Create a basic layout for the portal.
Next two weeks : Develop the real time discussion feature.
Next two weeks : Have a voting system on the discussions taking place on the portal.
By mid July or end of july : The first division of the work will be finished and also the results would be displayed on the portal.
By mid August : The second division of the work will be finished and the portal will all the features integrated to it in a maximally organized fashion would be functioning.
Where I see the risks :
One of the risky area which requires attention is to have the real time discussion on the portal along with ensuring the anonymity of the people participating in it. For that, I plan to provide a nick to every person which joins the discussion and that nick will be the same for that discussion. Another approach can be having a login system for the portal which will ensure that only one vote is casted by one person. I will be preferring the second idea for this. But yeah, I will be open to any better idea I encounter in future. One more issue of concern is that should there be a period after which the voting to a particular discussion shall not be allowed, else declaring a final result wouldn't be of much sense in absence of such a restriction, but then this requires to evoke a proper consensus of the people to vote before declaring a result so that it is not a 51/49% case. Apart from the these issues, I don't see any other area at this stage which might seek attention.
How will the results look like :
The final result will be a web portal where people can discuss their ideas without revealing their indentity. The discussion will be real time and will be something similar to a group chat. Also, people can can vote on a particular idea and see the subsequent results on various discussions that have taken place recently and earlier. The looks of the portal would be similar to what was mentioned as a skype session using CSS. The current status of the votes on the present discussion will be available alongside on the same page.