The current POSSE admissions cycle process takes a lot of time and manual slog on the admin side. Most of it is repetitive and could be done by a robot - so I wrote up the stuff I'd like automated so somebody (Ian Weller by default, but he's a little swamped with other infrastructure/development stuff, so I'm sure help would be welcome) can script 'em up.
http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Talk:POSSE_2009#Automating_the_application_process is a rough description of the problem spec - it's basically "here are the manual steps I go through, exactly in order, to process applications... now write a script to do them." A lot of this involves hooking limesurvey (which exports to easily-parseable csv) and the TOS wiki together, and figuring out how to send automatic emails with certain variables filled in. I think that pymediawiki (a bit of python code that lets you write bots that edit mediawiki according to rules you specify) will be a helpful thing here, and beyond that I'm not sure, but would love to hear suggestions/ideas. --Mel _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
