I mentioned un-informed.org twice before in this blog. In short we want to make UN resolutions for accessible to the world. Last week I went to Helsinki for a short but very productive meeting with many people from the MCM team, the people behind the un-informed.org project. I showed them the current state of development on the backend. Thanks to Dennis we already have a more or less working Excel import, so that we could look at things with some real world data (note that in absence of a real database the team is currently using Excelsheets). The result of the meeting is that we now have finalized the requirements for a first version of the backend which we hope to complete by March 2010. Since we are hoping that additional developers will join us this month, we have a plan A for this case and a plan B if we remain a two man IT team (Dennis and myself).
The next phase will be starting a symfony 1.4 app from scratch. We will however base this work on the current database schema which needs to be updated with the final requirements. I also hope that we can update the Excel import accordingly this month.
After this we will see if additional developers are joining our effort and decide on if we should work towards plan A or plan B. The plan B being essentially that we will keep using the Excelsheets for everything they currently support and only adding admintools for things not yet supported there. Plan A would be a full migration away from the Excelsheets with an importer to migrate the current data into the system.
So as you might have guessed by now, a large reason for this blog post is to find additional developers to help out. We need someone to help out on the UI, but also people implementing the server side modules. Ideally people could provide an average of 1 days worth of time per week for the next few months.
If you are into social network and/or semantic web stuff, there is also another project in the early planning stages. Currently Drupal and/or Semantic Media Wiki seem the most promising platforms there. So if you have expertise in either of these platforms and are willing to help please also do not hesitate to contact me.
As a side note, I am really quite saddened that all efforts to find professors willing to cooperate with these students have failed so far. I do not understand why professors think it makes more sense for comp-sci students to develop throw applications instead of taking up the opportunity to work on a real project. Sure there are some risks involved, but the rewards are too great to let it pass. I think that universities should really strive to engage inter-department cooperation. This will ensure that students are more motivated, learn how to apply their theoretical knowledge and also make friends in other departments. Especially the last point could help foster so many ideas that currently fall flat because comp-sci students only know comp-sci students, business students don't know comp-sci students, physics students don't know .. etc.
It sounds like you've got a worthy project here and I'd be interested in hearing more.
By way of a trade I'm a web developer, so I could help out with the UI, but I'd be much more interested in the server-side modules. I've been developing with PHP for going on 8 years now, but I should say I haven't had cause to use symfony before.
Lukas, as in Helsinki, I have problems following the inside talk but, hey, the progress: lovin it. I hope more interested people will join in soon to get the database running more easily.
