The C4G Fall 2009 class ended on a high note with ten of the twelve teams slated to deploy a usable system with their external partners. You can read about all the C4G projects on The Projects page.
We held a Project Review in early December that gave the students a chance to explain their projects to an audience and to show demonstrations of their working systems. The Project Review was open to the GT community and attended by faculty, students, staff and project partners. It was rewarding to see all the projects at once and hear how invested the students were in their work. Many shared with me how important the class was to them personally, but also professionally — when those who were graduating went on job interviews, they invariably spent most of the interview talking about their C4G project experience.
As part of the Project Review event, we also had a panel of distinguished external speakers who have experience working to solve pressing societal problems. The panel participants were
- Jason Carter, attorney at Bondurant, Mixson and Elmore, who also serves as Chair of the Georiga Appleseed Young Professionals Council and as Board Vice President for the Women’s Resource Center to End Domestic Violence;
- Jack Hardin, attorney at Rogers and Hardin, who is a member of the Regional Commission on Homelessness, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta;
- John Nkengasong, chief of the CDC Global AIDS Program’s International Laboratory Branch; and
- Protip Biswas, executive director of the Regional Commission of Homelessness in Atlanta and vice president of the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta.
We were fortunate to have such a committed group of individuals to provide feedback and support for our efforts.
Though the class is over, many of the projects will continue. To describe just a few examples:
- BLIS (Basic Laboratory Information System) is being presented to the CDC for feedback and eventual deployment.
- MyMANET recently received an NCIIA Sustainable Vision grant that will help create a non-profit company to deliver the technology. They are also working with the FAA on use of the system in disaster settings.
- The World Food Garden team will continue to work with the other WFG software development volunteers to see their site redesign to completion.
One of my personal favorite post-class stories is from mid-December when I attended our end-of-term Honors Reception for College of Computing undergraduates finishing with Honors. These students are presented with an honor cord that they where during graduation to signify their accomplishments. Much to my surprise, between one-third and one-half of the students graduating with honors were members of our C4G class. These students are good, really good, and also are doing good.
Written by Dr. Ellen Zegura
C4G Professor and Chair of the School of Computer Science
Few years back, I never thought of becoming a programmer. To be honest, I didn’t like the way people perceive programmers as nerds and geeks. Although I developed strong affinity for computers growing up, I didn’t want to be called nerd. I didn’t have ambition other than a vague desire of doing something great. I chose Biology as my major to please my parents.
Eventually, I came to a point where I couldn’t take it anymore, and I searched for my heart, and realized that I want to do something with numbers and logic. Computer Science seemed an inevitable choice.
Once I switched my major, my life improved drastically. My passion for life restored, and I loved every minute of the time spent in learning computer science. My first summer internship at a utility company was great experience. I couldn’t believe that there were people who were willing to pay me for doing what I love.
So what to do with my personal story and computing for good, you ask? Georgia Tech or schools are important part of our society. People discover about themselves and learn new knowledge . School helps people to grow. As a graduating senior, I want to thank Georgia Tech, its professors and students for restoring my faith in people and my passion.
Our team has received lot of valuable feedback from the CDC representative who is visiting Africa. We provided him an updated evaluation form, which has resulted in specific and relevant feedback in the form of user observations, lab descriptions, anecdotes, photos, and even a video. Based on this feedback we have revised our project plan to include a complete system architecture revision so accommodate many of the new flexible features that the feedback implies.
We also have a local on-site visit planned for this Friday at a lab in the Atlanta CDC. We plan on conducting a local evaluation of the BLIS system and get feedback from one of our CDC contacts in the area.
This project is actually turing out to be an interesting experiment in the software design process. Generally, we are thought that an important part of the process is gathering requirements. Our experience has actually proved that this is true, however, requirements gathering can be extremely difficult, and sometimes the requirements are not fully available. Developing a beta system based on predictions and assumptions can be a means to gather these requirements. Originally, we believed that the beta system we were developing was part of our implementation stage, however, we are now learning that this is actually still our requirements gathering stage. Although we know what we will end up re-architecturing the entire system, we still want to continue to make incremental changes to this beta product to aid in our requirements gathering stage.
Overall our teams motivation has never been higher. The feedback we are getting from Africa is extremely positive, and we are getting support and encouragement from multiple levels. The fundamental problem is that people are literally dying because of the lack of a good information system, and knowing that we will be having an impact large enough to actually save lives is extremely motivational.
Although we got a lot accomplished this week, we seem to have a lot more questions than answers. As we are fixing bugs and adding additional features to the application, we realized that although the app is rich in functionality, there is no process enforced through the workflow of the system. Because of the need to get something up and running ASAP, inital requirements gathering were sparse and incomplete, so there was no bottom-up designing done at the beginning of coding. This has lead to code that is somewhat scattered and hacked, with not enough scalability and customization built in.
Therefore, our plan has somewhat changed in terms of how to progress in the most efficient manner:
1. Right now, our CDC contact is in Africa doing usability interviews with some of the labs. In addition to doing very specific task-completion type usability evaluations with a variety of workers in different roles, we are asking him to go back and ask some very general role and process questions, so we can get a better sense of the natural workflow these technicians and administrators are used to, rather than trying to force the features we have deemed important onto them.
2. While this data and feedback collection is done overseas, we are trying to fix bugs and add additional functionality as quickly as possible, and in real-time response to critiques we are getting from our CDC contact. That way, as much of the actual functionality can be evaluated as possible for the short time he is over there.
3. Also during this time, we are reaching out to CDC lab technicians in Atlanta to get their input on the system thus far and to better understand the standard workflow of a lab. Even though we want this system to specifically address the needs of the workers in the African countires, because this new system is such a huge change from what they previously used, even they may not realize all the functionality they may want or could possibly find helpful. Hopefully, Atlanta technicians may be able to help us out to understand the basics of how a lab functions and how a lab info system should support these processes.
4. After the feeback collection period is over, our plan is to take a step back and re-evaluate the design and implementation of our code thus far. As this point, we will most probably do some significant re-designing on the structure of the code, keeping our functionality in place, while creating a system that is more sustainable from an implementation point of view. While we are excited to make the system more and more robust, our number one goal is the create something that will be used for years to come.
Overall, the past few weeks have been very productive from a coding and project understanding viewpoint. We are excited to hear back from the labs about what they think so far!!
Our group is working with the CDC to develop the online version of Healthy People 2020. One of the first steps we’ve taken is to try to find people in county health departments who use the current system; these contacts will be able to tell us how they use the current system, what sort of information they look for, and what changes they’d like to see, as well as providing feedback on our designs and prototypes as our work progresses.
Of course, as you may have guessed, finding the right person to talk to in a government agency can be kind of a challenge. As long as you call during operating hours, it’s generally pretty easy to get a real person on the phone at a county health department, but often this person hasn’t heard of Healthy People and isn’t sure who uses it. Still, they’re happy to connect you to their supervisor, who often is out of the office, so you leave a voicemail and hope they get back to you. Other times, you end up talking to some one who doesn’t use Healthy People and doesn’t know of anyone who does. Still, we are making progress, finding contacts, and starting to design our system.
After a few initial weeks of requirements gathering, a sit-down meeting, and plenty of email correspondence, the direction for the World Food Garden (WFG) is becoming more clear. Many factors were weighed in regards to platform selection, and after deliberation, it’s been decided that the WFG will work on the WordPress platform, utilizing php and MySQL.
This decision allows both Andrew and Lydia to begin working full-steam-ahead. Eve Sibley has created a page on the project’s specific wiki where both developers can fill a calendar with deadlines, priorities, and provide progress reports.
Upcoming tasks for Lydia include:
-Designing the WordPress Template.
-Diagramming the Flow for the new Website.
-Creating Wireframes to present to Eve for review.
Andrew has recently discovered a WordPress compatible Google Maps plugin that will allow for all of the utilities that the WFG desires. Andrew will also be working closely with a new contact the WFG has gained. Cyril, a developer at Eve’s new home (www.couchsurfing.com) is well-versed in both MySQL and WordPress plug-in use. Andrew will establish strong communication with Cyrill while continuing to familiarize himself with the php language and WordPress platform moving forward.
It was refreshing to meet with Protip and Amber from United Way. It’s been a bit of waiting (since Amber was out of town), so it was great to finally meet Amber and talk to both of them. Meetings can be boring and can drag on for quite a bit, and many times they don’t get much accomplished. But not this meeting. This meeting was a great step forward. A solid step forward. Everything was clear and to the point. We understood what they wanted and they were equally excited with our direction.
It’s not everyday that you meet people who are motivated to help the homeless. Nor people that understand the homeless. Well, that’s the feeling we got about the folks who work at United Way. They have a compassion, a caring heart. The homeless community is an alien group to most people. They’re ignored, avoided, and many times shunned. Here’s to hoping that our work and the work done by United Way can change that!
When working with this Social Services Consumer Portal, we have had some trouble getting out of the gate and begin our implementation process. Bill Matson, our project coordinator at Pathways, gave our group a set of objectives that turned out to be different from our expectations as well as the expectations from Professor Vempala. We have been corresponding through email with Professor Vempala, Bill, and Protip Biswas who gave us the presentation on homelessness.
In summary, the main problem was that Bill required us to create a completely separate database from the Pathways’ user database or the database of the agencies. In order to pre-qualify an end-user to see if they are eligible for a social service, we would need to capture the required data from the various agencies and put it on our database. However, all of this data is already on the Pathways database and our database would lead to information redundancy and might not be scalable as new organizations get added. However, after much deliberation, we have been granted access to the database as long as we define our portal to be separate system to comply with the federal regulations.
Today, we are creating a very basic initial interface. We would like the user to be able to enter his information and see his data. Bill has provided us with SSH and http access and dummy user account information and dummy data. All of the dummy data is in the same format as the Pathways’ database. We are creating our interface based on this data and once this is working correctly, we can then connect it to the Pathways’ database for actual user trials.
We have recently started the process of visiting agencies to get user feedback and perform user observations. So far we visited travelers aid and the experience was not as beneficial as we had hoped. We would have really liked to observe some users using the system in action but due to confidentiality issues we were not able to. One benefit was getting an application so we can fill out the system ourselves as their users do. Another benefit was hearing about some of the major complaints and what issues took the most time. Using this information we will be able to start improve the system. We look forward to meeting with more agencies to gather more information about changes to make.
“In Rwanda, Technology is Helping Education to be Catalyst for Peace” describes an initiative to help the Rwanda Ministry of Education keep track of information about students, teachers and infrastructure across various educational institutions under its purview.
The solution being developed since 2007, consists of an Education Management Information System (EMIS) which the teachers, government personnel can use to enter and collect information digitally. Before work started on this project, schools used to “receive questionnaires to fill out by hand about the number of students, grades, etc, which were then collected physically in each district and brought to the ministry for the annual report.”
Among other things, the overview document mentions — “Because in Rwanda not every school or district has access to the Internet, users can store the data on a flash disk and bring it to the District Center or to a cybercafé to upload the information onto the online system.” This is similar to the connectivity issues that some of the C4G class teams, esp. LIS and V2V would be looking to solve for their respective project deployments.
There is not much detail given on technology being used and the business model being followed by the stakeholders (Rwanda Ministry of Education, Microsoft and other partners). This project can be an interesting case study on the following aspects -
- How does the involvement of a major corporate (Microsoft in this case) affect the solution development.
- Is the project technology/deployment closely coupled to the future performance of the corporate involved.
- Does involvement of a large corporate always help (or not help) in reaching an effective, sustainable solution.
- Although it is natural for corporates to employ their own proprietary or open-source technologies, how is the resulting system kept flexible and resilient enough to a possible change of technology in the future.
- Are corporate-backed initiatives prone to more “hidden costs” in the long run vis-a-vis an independent set of developers or an academic group.
