Hi Nisha, Srinivas,
Thanks.. the idea started out with engaging a college's whole computer engineering department or a prof and his/her students for a full-fledged internship/mou project that extends over at least 3 months. And then I thought it would be better to throw the challenge out in the open instead of locking-in dependency... if the bus authority is the one issuing the challenge then it'll probably carry through and get taken up seriously. Professors usually complain about not having meaty projects for their students' internships. So let's meet that demand.
So right now this is how I envision a possible contest timeline (I'm thinking to much ahead but here it is anyway):
1. Announcement with open sharing of data and design requirements (so really kicking it off with all resources made available)
2. Taking in registrations from teams
3. Forming an online community of all participating teams and airing out all doubts, clarifications etc there
4. Setting periodic "checkpoints" of select features that each team must achieve and showcase or else be dropped from the competition. (like achieving map display, achieving stops-editing, on-map editing, GTFS conversion, etc)
5. Final lap of 1 month to get everything together, and have to put up fully functional prototype loaded with data for public review by a set deadline.
6. Some surprises that I don't want to reveal right now, they'll work only if kept secret.
And here's how I'm thinking of bringing the aspects of collaboration in :
Teams can contact each other and merge into one, with no roll-back possibility. This will be easily done IF we haven't kept any prize money that needs to be split. This could lead to, say, a joint solution created by 2 or 3 colleges working together.
I don't care if it doesn't work out at the end.. something of this sort will produce something or the other that's useful. After all, when you want to hit a target, you need to fire a few degrees upward to account for gravity.
What I've visualized in the ppt is basically a visualization of the needs that the folks at PMPML have been telling us again and again over the last few months. 2 weeks back the newly appointed CMD also told us that they desperately need this kind of thing, and so I decided to flesh out the requirements so we have something detailed to go with.
This would happen at the output end of an ongoing effort to (finally!) standardize the data that they have, bringing it to a format that is both human and machine compatible (and PMPML-approved.. their consent and commitment is critical). So it's taking shape here, please see the "swargate" sheet: