Supporting Application ...

With voting deadline for the first cycle just round the corner ... its time to start defining, designing and developing the Application to support the selection of future cycles of the Community Driven Features initiative.

I'll leave the two voulnteers ... John (niskypto) and Deepa (deepa7476) to consult each other and come up with a division of labour in the development of this ZOHO creator Application.

But first, I'd like to make some suggestions for the scope and design of this Application. Here are my thoughts.

a) The Application should support the efficient adminstration of this process. To this end, it should facilitate the direct entry of suggestions for candidates and the subsequent voting of the suggestions. The Application Administrator should only be involved in updating the active/inactive status of the Suggestion and Voting stages.

b) Authoring of suggestions and Voting should be restricted to those that have ZOHO UserID's ... but how does one provide this without having to provide Share Access to each participant ? ... is it sufficient to let users type in their UserID (honor system) ... and perhaps sendmail all event confirmations to this UserID ? ... or is there another method of verifying this ?

And what about the voting process ? ... how does one prevent abuse/fraud ?

c) Should the Application be a complete administrative mechanism ... facilitating suggestions, subsequent discussions and voting ? ... or should discussions be carried out in ZOHO Discussion Forums (like with Cycle #1) ? ... discussing them on the forum will provide greater exposure to this facility ... otherwise it risks being limited to a small subset of the User Base.

Also, asking authors of suggestions to setup a discussion post will provide a means to verify the UserID supplied within the Application.

d) All suggestions should be given (an automatically generated) SuggestionID (e.g. #.nn where # is the current Cycle Number and nn is an autoincremented number 01 to 99).

e) Application should allow Users to edit and/or delete their previously contributed suggestions (as long as the Suggestions Process is "active") ... however, all Users should be able to know about this activity by Viewing a Change Log Table.

f) For voting, each User will be allowed to specify their 1st, 2nd and 3rd choices ... 1st choice can not be same as 2nd or 3rd choice ... 2nd choice can not be same as 3rd choice.

g) Users may edit their choices as long as the Voting Stage is "active".

I invite your thoughts and suggestions for the scope/design of this Application.

Gaev