Brain Dump

I met with Dr. Umphress, one of the head guys in the Software Engineering graduate program on campus, today. We talked about my community management software package. What I want, why I think it’s important, and that sort of thing.

Now, I already knew that my idea was a good one. An organic community management system with all software server-side is something that society could just do with. But I must say that it’s always gratifying to have someone else, someone not really in your field, go ‘Wow, this sounds like a really exciting project. I really want to be involved in this.’

And, yeah, that’s pretty much what he said. Having a job that is at least partially administrative, he’s a busy guy, and warned me that he probably won’t be able to do as much as he’d like. (Though he did express special interest in security and privacy work, since that’s one of his big interests.) However, he did offer to get in touch with the 70+ graduate students at Auburn and see who might be interested.

While he hasn’t contacted them yet, he said he knew of half a dozen or so who would probably find the project extremely interesting, it would just be a matter of whether they were already deeply invested in research or not.

We also talked, briefly, about the possibility of obtaining some grants to fund development once we get to the prototype stage. Now, the grants themselves don’t really excite me, but the idea of having a project get to a point where people are willing to provide money to continue working on it, that excites me.

So, here I am, bouncing and bubbly, all excited thinking about how much fun this is going to be to work on, and hoping that the pieces come together. I mean, it’s a project I think is important and valuable to society, it’s something I will really enjoy doing, and (in the back of my mind) heading up a project like this will look pretty dang good when I start applying to graduate programs.

Anyway! As always, I’m eager to discuss the project with any and all comers. If you’re curious about what I’m thinking, or have ideas of your own, toss me an email! I obsessively check thomas.robertson@thesmerf.com (and every other email address I have), so please, if you’ve got something to say about the formation, management, and interaction of communities online I want to hear it.

Thomas

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 07:14 and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.