Iron Architect Challenge - The Feedback's Feedback
Problem Statement
This year’s “Iron Architect Contest” is about creating a new community experience for Tech-Ed: Developers which provides a new learning and knowledge exchange platform to increase the value of the event for attendees. Communities are extremely powerful when they connect and network. We therefore wish to investigate a new community infrastructure to support onsite attendee networking. As you know, having a great feedback mechanism in place is important to better understand the needs of attendees, speakers and organizers alike. In addition to providing feedback sometimes it’s important to discuss topics and issues of the day. So, wouldn’t it be great if you could sign up for an ad-hoc discussion? Have a discussion about a topic that was covered in the presentation session you just attended? Connect with the speaker and other attendees to get the unique chance to clarify your questions or to debate about a certain topic? Or think about the opportunity to get connected to attendees with similar interests? You could opt-in for a service that allows you to setup roundtables with attendees who have similar interests or who attended the same sessions as you did. Here’s how such a system might work.
Requirements
There is a need to build a new system to enhance the community experience for next year’s Tech-Ed: Developers in 2007. Aware of attendee feedback, sessions they attend and their follow-up requests, the new system should dynamically schedule requests for discussion sessions and roundtables, allocate rooms, and notify attendees about their scheduled meetings. Optionally, the system should support community voting for the repeat delivery of popular sessions based on session attendance statistics such as number of attendees and amount of feedback received.
Assumptions
· The system must be technically feasible using current or just-announced technologies.
· The existing feedback system can’t be replaced but minor changes would be allowed.
· There are 5 discussion rooms available: 1 each for 10 attendees, 15 attendees and 30 attendees; and 2 for 20 attendees
· The agenda and timetable follows a similar format to this year’s.
Task
You should design a solution and infrastructure architecture that will address the problem, requirements and assumptions stated above for presentation to the organizing committee of Tech-Ed: Developers consisting of business people and senior technical architects.
