Brains working towards machine consciousness

 I don't know whether anything will come of the actual project, in this case, but the idea came up of an open source application to make it simple for teachers (or other staff) to be able to 'aggregate' reports from subject teachers for a particular pupil or student.  

Over on my (new, and yet to be customised) Communal Learning Project site, which is essentially just an issue tracker (in fact, currently it is Redmine with a couple of plugins), I set up a project to collect user requirements.  This is a brief guide on how to request features for the system.

So, at the moment, you don't need to log in to add a feature request.  I may have to change that if the idiot spammers decide it would be a good place to wreak their normal brand of imbecility, but hopefully they won't (hah, who am I trying to kid?).

Click on "New Issue"

Select the Feature tracker

Fill in some details describing what you want the software to be able to do

And then click down in the bottom left on Create.

If you are logged in, the system tells my micro-blogging site (which is an instance of Laconica, which I ought to get round to upgrading) that you have added an issue.  If you aren't logged in, it just reports that an issue has been added.

Then when there are enough expected behaviours (or features) logged on the system, it will be possible to make some design decisions about what is needed.  For instance, do you want to be able to write reports online? Or do you want to write reports in a package like MS Word and upload them?  Do you want to specifically *not* upload them, and have a way of merging reports just using local files on PCs (non-brand specific!) in the institution?  

Of course, the system could be written to have the look and feel of an internet application whilst still being safely on the local institutional network, if that is a good choice.