The course web site for 6.171 will be used to coordinate communications
among the students, teachers, clients, and mentors. Here are some of
the specifications for the site:
minimum launchable feature set
abstract URLs should be used for all pages (we must practice what we preach)
each user should be able to have one or more of the following roles:
student, teacher, mentor, client, site administrator
each new user registration requires approval from a site
administrator
the site should have a discussion forum, with a similar design and
interface to http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a?topic_id=21&topic=Aviation
(nice to have: restriction of some threads to "teachers-only" and those
threads hidden from other users) -- this needs to be up and running ASAP
so that students can use it to find teammates
a database table containing all potential client projects and the
text of all emails received from that client describing the project
(contact clients via email to make sure that they are still available
and interested)
a page in which teams can browse potential client projects and
rank their favorites (we want to encourage each team to pick 5 projects)
a page showing all the teams and which students are on each team
(i.e., there needs to be a database table mapping students to teams)
a page showing all the students, and next to the student's name, the
team and project on which he or she is working
a page showing the team-client assignments
nice to have
a place for clients and teachers to go and enter "trouble tickets"
or other comments about the project
a place to store private communications from the teachers to the
teams, e.g., critiques or reports of interviews the the clients
tools
the site should run using Linux, Postgres, and Ruby on Rails