problem-statements.md

amFOSS Internal Hackathon 1.0

Problem Statements

1. Though there is a status update reporting system enforced in the club, many of our members do not send their status updates on time or regularly. What can be done to make them send status updates? Ideas may be in the form of gamification, incentives, etc. or maybe some tool to automate the process further and ease their job.

2. We have several responsibilities being distributed in the club, but often it gets hard to track progress and account people. Many at times, members don't find interest in different activities of the club, or get engaged with their own work. What can be done to pull them into the club activities and actively engage everyone? Gamification ideas, with clear implementation plan, might be a potential solver.

3. Some members of the club skip eating food multiple times a day, consume junk food, and often lose sleep. What can be done to promote a healthy lifestyle among the members and enforce a balance between work and health? We are not looking at complex tracking devices, there might be a simple never thought solution?

4. Currently, the courier handling service of the college is completely manual. There is no proper system for tracking a parcel after it reaches Clappana, resulting in people having to go personally to the mailroom and enquire about their parcel. A potential solution for this can be a global system for the mailroom maintainer and recipients. Whenever recipients expect a parcel, they can make a record in the app, visible to the maintainer too. As soon as the parcel reaches, the maintainer can mark it as received and the recipient can simply go and collect it without hassle.

5. The attendance system implemented in the lab currently depends upon hardware and is sometimes unreliable. We are looking for an attendance system that accurately measures the duration a member spends in the lab, if possible with minute details like whether he was working on the machine or attending a meeting etc. Ideas that incorporate less or nil hardware and maintenance will be appreciated.

6. Status updates tell a lot about what a member has been doing over a period of time. Our CMS today is capable of logging status updates of members including the content of the mails. What can we do with this raw data so that we can make use of to assess, help and track the progress of a member? The idea may incorporate NLP or other advanced technologies.

7. Beginners often dropout from learning something new, if they get stuck troubleshooting an error. However, the solution to this is already on the internet, and a good googler can easily find it in minutes. What pedagogies and technologies can we use to teach members especially first years googling. By googling, we lay emphasis on technical googling and by that good judgment skills to know what likely is a dependable source and solution.

8. The club manages a few Open Source projects such as GitLit, Qujini, TempleApp. The contributions to these are limited to the club members, and generally, too, it's very difficult for communities and projects to reach out to greater masses including consumers and external developers. On the other hand, these just started community projects are often ideal for beginner developers who might otherwise find it hard to contribute to already matured projects. Can we find a way out to enable the discovery of such projects, and the promotion of such projects and help small growing communities like ours? The club already is working on a similar project, GitLit. It would be nice if we had something like ProductHunt or Devfolio for FOSS projects and communities.

9. Some members especially newcomers into the club may shy away from approaching a senior for help, or perhaps don't know which senior to approach as they don't know who is doing what. Our club has expert seniors in most fields, and they might be able to solve a very technical problem a junior member might belong facing within a matter of minutes. However, we are not able to tap this potential within, and our members take up a lot of time learning and solving the problem surfing the internet (which is good again, anyways). A system that could break the ice, and be a yellow page for members to find the right guy to approach when at a very technical misery might be a great deal for many of us!

10. A large amount of GSoC data exists on the web, and our senior members also have a good insight into it. Can we use all these to create an app that can suggest a hitlist of GSoC projects for a member on based on what he knows? Or perhaps, a hitlist of technologies learning which most GSoC projects can be done? A system that can show the probability of selection will be great for sure.

11. Find the faculty. The hassle of signing forms or submitting an assignment is coupled with the frequent problem of finding the assigned teacher. A student may or may not find a teacher in the cabin, and it proves to be a waste of time for both the involved parties. One probable solution to this problem would be to maintain a timetable of every teacher, which could contain information about their whereabouts and at what time and any student can approach the required teacher at that moment.

12. Integration for CMS with AHMS: Stay back requests should be automatically sent and approved in AHMS for a member if he is having attendance for the duration verified by the CMS. For now, we can get the raw attendance data, using it get a solution to automate the whole process.