I'd say depending on where a user signs up or what status he has he could fill out an extended profile. When a status is changed, only the information of the current profile, or the profile the viewer has access to will be displayed (e.g. if a student is working as a teaching assistant he'd be a student as well as a member of staff. If a student wants to find out about him, he'd only see the student details, if it is a staff member it would see the staff details and if the viewer is both, he'd see both information).
How about internationlisation of these profiles? Let's assume you ask "What is your haircolour" in the faculty, but the german department wants to know "Was ist Deine Haarfarbe ?". Are these two different questions or are they the same ?
Talking about different questions. Will there be a set of fixed questions the departments could choose from? Or can every department come up with their own questions as well. If the latter is the case, what happens if department A is asking "Do you like apples" and department B is asking "Do you like apples as well?".
These questions are the same with regards to the likely answer. But how do you make the correlation.
Last but not least, if you detect (by whatever means) that a question is identical to a question the user already has answered, should this answer be displayed for him, should he be able to change it and if he changes it should it only be changed for this profile or for all profiles where the question comes up.
Displaying of information. To what degree can a user decide what information should be displayed to whom? Not that it would really matter technically, but it might complicate the UI considerably :).
