WikiStart > Documentation > Using Beaversource

Beaversource

Beaversource fuses both social networking and project-hosting to provide students, researchers and teachers with ability to connect, collaborate and maintain projects and interest-based communities at Oregon State University. As a social network, Beaversource unites user interests and skills through the use of a Tag Cloud where information is gathered from user profiles, communities and projects to help users find people with similar interests, backgrounds or classes. Unlike other social networks, Beaversource operates on a local level, connecting OSU students by making it easier to pool resources and spread ideas on and off campus. Beaversource implements project-hosting to take the complexity and headache out of setting up a shared wiki, enabling file sharing, project management and tracking tools, mailing lists, etc, so that focus can be spent simply on doing work. By hosting student projects in one central place, Beaversource allows outsiders to get a better idea of what goes on at OSU. If you want to find out what Computer Science and Engineering students learn at OSU, check out the current projects on Beaversource from home.

The Social Network

Member Profiles

Personal user-profiles provide Beaversource members with a location to share information about themselves. As you can see below, and the profile is designed to be accessible with highlighted links to signify interests and skills that other members of Beaversource share. Profiles in Beaversource also implement widgets similar to Facebook applications or Google gadgets.Through use of these widgets, you can see posted videos, the tag cloud, a list of his friends, projects and communities he's involved with as well as messages posted on his message board.

Group Profiles

The primary role of communities in Beaversource is to connect students, researchers, professors and ideas. Many people have similar interests and backgrounds and groups help identify and organize communication to aid in the exchange of ideas and organization events. Groups also give you the ability to showcase and communicate the goals and activities of your group to others at OSU. A group profile also includes a forum where members can post blogs as well as areas to create group wiki pages, upload media and files.

Projects

Projects are a key component of Beaversource. A project can represent a variety of things. For instance, Beaversource is a project, and the people that work on that project are members of the Beaversource admin project. This project is focused on the design, development, expansion and maintenance of the Beaversource's Code Orange source code. Users creating an entry for the 2009 International Aerial Robotics Competition are members of the OSURC Aerial Project, sponsored by the OSU Robotics Club. Another project example is the OSWALD hand-held computer project. The goal of this project is to gather resources and information for the OSWALD hand-held computer.

The Roadmap

The 'Roadmap' provides a view on the ticket system that helps planning and managing the future development of a project. The 'Roadmap' is a list of future milestones. Each milestone contains a description (using WikiFormatting) describing main objectives and other goals. In addition, the tickets targeted for a milestone are aggregated, and the ratio between active and resolved tickets is displayed as a progress bar.

Tickets

The Tickets tab in Beaversource reports the active tickets in your project. Active tickets are bugs or issues within the project that have not been resolved. The report shows the Ticket #, Component, Version, Milestone, Type, Owner and Date of creation. For more information see TracReports.

WikiStart > Documentation > Using Beaversource