2020-10-05, TEC

Evolving UCC

1 The problem

  • UCC has the capability/potential to be a fantastic club for CS/DS/ElectricEng students
    • We have physical, enterprise-grade servers
    • We have electrical equipment: Soldering ion, Oscilloscope, and much more!
    • We have the most non-UWA-locked-down computers available in one place on campus
  • Our image doesn’t line up with what we can do
    • We’re well placed to serve these students
    • …we don’t (much)
    • elaboration…

2 A path forwards

  1. Identify the questions we should be asking
    • What’s are the issues?
      • UCC seems to be getting quieter
      • UCC has had a sequence of unfortunate events (2019 Drama, 2020 Tenancy + Pandemic)
    • What are we doing well?
    • What are we doing badly?
    • What improvements can we make?
  2. This is a big project, pull in as many people as possible.

3 Idea

3.1 More project nights

3.2 More club collaboration

3.3 Make UCC’s value proposition clearer to new students

4 Potentially beneficial projects

4.1 Tech talk ranker

4.1.1 Problem

UCC does tech talks. UCC doesn’t have a good way of determining which tech talks people want to hear from, and lining them up with what people want to do.

4.1.2 Solution

So, it would be good to have a way for people to

  • request tech talks
  • vote to hear tech talks
  • comment on tech talks
  • have people nominate themselves to deliver a given talk, or add a new item
  • spam prevention
  • email notification for those that express interest in a talk when it goes ahead
    • LDAP login option, use associated email address
      • if user linked to discord, provide discord ping option instead (involves UCC-Bot integration)
    • or, provide own email address
  • history of tech talks would also be good
  • scope for more integration with discord bot (vote from discord, announcements, etc.)
    • either via adding localhost API to discord bot and/or shared DB, and/or discord bot API, and/or pipes, etc.
  • (stretch) live updates via websockets would be nice. There is also the hobo polling approach / comet

4.2 Improve discord bot

  1. Improve UCC bot’s help messages
  2. Have UCC bot ping one random unregistered person per day
  3. Have UCC bot sync config changes from UCC’s AD server
  4. Have UCC bot generate command file which when run by a superuser propogates role changes from discord to AD
  5. Create webpage for UCC tech talk idea ranking and suggestions
  6. Integrate that page ^ with the UCC bot
  7. Allow users to use the UCC bot to register interest in particular UCC events, and get pinged in advance
  8. Allow users to customise when they want to be pinged, with sensible defaults
  9. Extend UCC bot to integrate with the IRC side of things
  10. Write a CLI to interact with the UCC bot on UCC’s systems
  11. Have UCC bot read event details from a .ical URL and act acordingly
  12. Extend ICAL reading functionality to sending email reminders for events as needed
  13. Create nice HTML/plaintext mulipart email template to use for emails

Date: 2020-10-05

Author: TEC

Created: 2020-12-28 Mon 15:12