Quantum Leap Social Media project stage 1 began this week. On three consecutive days (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) we took turns to go down to the high school and talk to the kids and see what they want/think/prefer in social media. Day 1 had them talk about what they would like to see, Day 2 how they would like to see it, and Day 3 had them toy around Google Sites to create their own site so that if we fail miserably, they will at least have a personal space to which post their own stuff.

We drafted a document with their requirements (that I currently do not have access to), which will be included here once I get it. But  the most interesting – and gratifying – thing to me, is how much they centered it around privacy. No personalized ads, or tracking, or suggestions, ability to limit scope of posts (who sees it and how), have a group limit (all these users are part of X group, that I want only to see Y) and chose how to present content were the most prevalent topics of conversation.

Another concern brought up was bullying: social media is ripe for abuse, and considering that this would be limited to the high school environment where bullies already interact, it was a point of discussion how to limit the chance of it happening. While I find the notion of some sort of filtering mildly concerning due to the many, many ways it could go wrong, the fact that it was a main point of discussion shows that it is very important to the kids, and so should be implemented in one or another way.

I am not sure how much of all this we can get done by December, but I think it will be an interesting exercise. We went over the roles of the each team member in class in relationship to the silent auction project, which we have already begun working on, and how each ‘team’ has to communicate with the other ones to work adequately. In my case, I am serving the role of the ‘sysadmin’; as such, I don’t push requirements or communicate much with people over what I  want, but rather serve to listen to team members over their needs and implement them as requested.

The list of requirements I got were Python, MySQL, PyMySQL, Docker, and Flask, all which seems fairly standard and doable. I have concerns over the Docker containers, because multiple people can/will build different containers with the same package but different configurations, or different versions, instead of discussing in the table what specifically they want me to install (and refactor then, not later when the container’s versions collide). My concerns were not listened to, so I will wash my hands off of it.

Beyond this, I will create user accounts for SFTP access without sudo privileges, as I am aware that different people have the same requirements and would rather avoid the possibility of someone overwriting something over someone else. After all is said and done, we will synchronize to the production server through GitHub. The repository is already created, but there is no move to publish anything there until we have something to show.

In any event, I will get the physical server next class and go from there. Server setup is relatively quick, and shouldn’t bring much of an issue.