Takneek Challenge:
Say no to Spamming

The biggest challenge of a technical festival is to come up with solutions to some of the burning issues of a community. A problem which is pertinent currently is the way information is being conveyed to students by the gymkhana, departmental committees and other sources.

It's easy to see that our calendar is abuzz with myriad events and it makes perfect sense to convey to the student's community about everything happening on campus. This often leads to each one of us receiving a large number of mails almost every day. As a result, amidst this flurry of mails we miss out on the ones containing information of interest to us. On some days their sheer number is overwhelming and often irritating.

Now here lies the challenge, can we come up with a software solution/system which would enable us to convey information more efficiently. It could be a desktop app, something may be linked with twitter/face book, a forum, a website or just anything which would work.

The teams would need to submit an abstract and a basic implementation to demonstrate the viability of their idea. Both would carry equal weight age. Your code need not be original. It may be a number of applications on the internet bundled into one package.

Some of the things on which judging would be made is:

• Ease and convenience of use.
• Effectiveness of the system in conveying information.
• The security of the whole system.
• Other add ons which would lead to an overall better user experience. (like you may include a personal scheduler for everyone where all the activities of the day which a person wants to attend are highlighted).

Revised versions of the rules of the competitions would soon be available.

Some suggestions where people can start up:

• Build an internal IITK Twitter (the original one has too much noise) where the basic details of events can be posted. It can linked to a blog containing detailed information about events. Students can subscribe to these blogs and receive one or two digest mails a day.
• A desktop app based on RSS feeds.

Well you could do limitless things. The suggestions made above are not binding and are just to give a feel of what kind of solutions might be possible. Challenge yourself !

Contacts:

BVV Srirajdutt	bvvsrd@iitk.ac.in	+91 9005211005
Pulkit Agrawal	pulkit@iitk.ac.in	+91 9935590072