Forum OpenACS Development: Assessment "Son of Survey" package discussion

Several of us have been working on enhancements to the current "survey" package. The goal is to create a much more capable generic "assessment" package that can be used in more types of applications and by other packages. We'd like to get a substantial revision of the package out in Q1 2004 (for 5.1? who knows).

To move this ahead, we've created an area in the Projects section of openacs.org to develop some docs about this effort. Some of us are principled believers in "documenting-before-coding". Me, I'm just too dumb and slow to start slinging code without a clear idea what I'm doing. 😉

Anyway, anyone who is interested in this should please come over and help review and revise these plans. Thanks!

Here's the project url: https://openacs.org/projects/openacs/packages/assessment/

I will attend as well (for obvious reasons). Sadly I'm currently at the other end of the world with regards to Stan, so we do it either next week, or early in the morning (Pacific Time).

Glad to hear of the interest, and I agree a chat would be very helpful sooner rather than later. How about tomorrow Thursday Nov 13 at 0600 PDT = 0900 EDT = +7/8 in Europe?

Hi Stan, I'm happy to have the chat next week, as I will be back from India (which is GMT+5.5). Normally I'd have no problems in attending tomorrow, but we already have plans with the office guys here.

Once I'm back anything is fine with me, so you do not need to get up at 6am ;). How about wednesday and pick a time (preferred in the morning (PST)) ?

Wednesday would be great, but it should start at about 16:00 CET (german time), since i do have an appointment in the evening.

I will be there as well. As I'm still in India, I wil have to add that to the list:
0700PST = 1000EST = 1500GMT = 1600CET=2030IST on Wed 11/19
This really is a drawback of Globalisation 😊

Since most people ended up with conflicts during the planned chat today, Malte and I decided to reschedule for next week:

0700PST = 1000EST = 1500GMT = 1600CET = 2030IST on Wed 11/26

Hope that works for most people who want to join in. The objectives for this chat (and the ongoing asynchronous discussion via doc/comments we're developing in the Projects section, plus discussions here) are:

1. agree on a common data model that supports identified uses (educational; clinical trials; others? -- this is where we're focused now)

2. define areas where we have distinct, nonoverlapping functionality in the application domains, and what this implies for the datamodel and UIs

3. review development time-table

A couple of the most difficult/interesting issues are how to handle data validation steps, and whether to use curriculum, workflow or our own version of workflow for the branching/sequencing mechanisms.

We had a useful discussion today; transcript available here: https://openacs.org/irc/log/2003-11-26

Next conversation on #openacs will happen:

0700PST = 1000EST = 1500GMT = 1600CET = 2030IST on Tues 12/2

At this early stage of the project, the conversation resembles to some degree the proverbial blind men touching different parts of the elephant, so all insights are certainly great to have!