Andrew Flick's Blog

Currently, I'm getting a good share of blog posts and e-mails about the positions available in INETAA.  So, the biggest question is “How do I get involved?”  First, a big cheers to the community...the responses have been awesome...

So, to apply for this position(s) contact me at aflick@mvps.org by submitting the following information:

Your Name:

Position(s) you're seeking.

(If Academic Regional Director then your location)

After, I get this, I'll get in touch with you about the next steps, more detailed information, and make introductions to the appropriate teams.

The International .NET Association Academic is a sub-committee of INETA with a focus on taking the voice and the needs of academic space and giving it the assistance required to form successful communities and help academics have a say in the workings of INETA.  The INETAA Student Committee is currently looking to fill the roles of different project teams and asks the help of the most dedicated and talented students/professionals to take part in the management/infrastructure of the User Group of Academic User Groups.

INETAA Available Positions

Academic Regional Director

This position is a managerial and reporting position with direct ties to the student population and the Microsoft Student Ambassadors in their region.  Each Academic Regional Director will have the SA’s that are in their region as contact points for extended collaboration.  The end goal of the Academic Regional Director is to help build community, foster growth and collaboration between Industry and Academia, and help recruit and maintain the management structure of INETAA.  The ideal candidate should be a student, a natural community leader and understand how to influence and lead a team of individuals.  Prior knowledge to building an effective community is a definite plus.  Essentially, you are the Rockstars of INETAA.

Director of Marketing

This position will manage all marketing of INETAA Student Committee and will directly interface with INETAA’s marketing professional.  The candidate should understand how to plan marketing stragetgies and effective means to influence the academic market.  Required skills include Graphics Design capabilities utilizing tools such as Photoshop and the ability to talk to mid-to-senior level Industry Professionals and discuss partnership strategies.  Knowledge of Flash is a definite plus.  Your team will be in charge of developing marketing materials along with all Press Releases.  .

Industry Academic Alliance Relationship Manager

This position will work with the Director of IAA and help facilitate the relations between Academia and Industry.  This is a challenging market to break into and will require an individual who can pull resources from nothing and who has the perseverance and will to achieve an effective relationship.  Furthermore, as an IAARM you will be help shape the role-out of a major INETAA program and have direct influence on the design and scalability of the program.

ASKit Film Producer

As the ASKit film producer, your job will be to conduct interviews with Industry Professionals.  As the Askit Film Producer, you will work directly with the Director of ASKit’s to help reach content goals.  A knowledge of journalism or the creation of video media is a definite plus although not required. 

ASKit Developer

As an ASKit Developer you will construct basic to advance applications with a focus of teaching best practices and coding techniques to the entry-level to advance academic developer.  Furthermore, you will interface directly with the On-Line Community and help build the community by taking existing application submissions and showing them what a development rock-star can do.  A strong knowledge in .NET is essential for this position along with the capability and flexibility to develop for any .NET targeted platform and the ability to utilize any existing tools.

ASKit Documentation Specialist

As the Documentation Specialist you will take the code from the ASKit Developer and write technical documentation on how to achieve these projects in a number of steps.  Through tight coupling with the developer you will build How-To’s and Windows Media Player walkthroughs explaining the steps required to build these applications.  A clear understanding of the development process and some best practices is a plus.  Furthermore, this position is also a needed position by a number of pro-devs on the committee, star Doc’s Specialists may be extended a position after collegiate gradutation.

Internal Systems Developer

If developing is your goal and working with Senior Professional Developers, Architects, and Directors is of any interest, this position is definitely for you.  Working directly with talented professionals to help build the infrastructure of INETAA is the job of the IS Dev.  You will most likely be building against a host of online portal technologies and must have strong development knowledge.  

I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the Northern New Jersey .Net User Group (N³UG) and while there we discussed the My Libraries.  I do think the overall idea behind them is REALLY cool, however, there are some problems...

Where exactly is all the code for the My Libraries?  What exactly was the VB team thinking there?  In the words of the famed DonXML why didn't they open the source and release them as application blocks???  That way we would have the source code and be able to utilize them and extend them as we saw fit...not just call some method.  In other words, truely make them our own.

However, for what ever reason they were not released this way...meaning they truely aren't My libraries.  Well if they aren't mine...who's are they?  Jeff Julian, the Prophet behind Geeks with Blogs, knows exactly who owns them.  He has proclaimed the “My Libraries are the Devil.” 

A special thanks to the anonymous N³UG who helped us come upon this startling realization.  Closing with a call-out to the community...if they aren't My Libraries...what should we call them?

Scott Canham has recently taken over INETAA -- IAA initiative as the new Product Manager.  He forwarded an INETAA internal email around, but I figured I'd post it and look for feedback from the community en masse.

INETAA will have it's very own server....

• DELL PowerEdge PIV-2.0 Ghz
• 1.0 GB ECC RAM 
• 3 x 60 GB HD's
• Windows Server 2003 Ent.
• SQL Server 2000
• and a few others that will be announced as they become public.

Lots of exciting stuff going on here.  We may be looking for some community support in the development aspect.  So, if you find yourself interested in helping out...let me know!!!

A recent development out of the depths of months of INETAA Student Committee Meetings has been the introduction of the Academic Starter Kit.

This Groups Product Manager is Paul Hacker.  The following content is what we are going to try and implement into it.  I realize that this is really scarce, but if anyone has questions on the meaning...or if anyone would like to add to the content or help in it's creation let me know!! We can use all the help we can get!

Audience

• Student Developers
• Little or No Development Experience (For 100-Level Kits)

Technologies

• Core Technologies (Visual Development) 100-Level
• WinForm Development
• (C#/VB)
• Web Development
• ASP.Net Web-Application
• ASP.Net Web-Service
• Compact Framework Development
• (C#/VB)
• Core Technologies (Business Development) 200-Level
• Security
• Basics
• Introduction to Security in .Net
• Building Reusable Software
• Classes, Structs, etc
• Introduction to Architecture & n-tier Applications
• Core Technologies (Advanced Development) 300 - 400 Level
• Microsoft Application Blocks
• Creating and Utilizing Software Components
• WSE 2.0
• Etc.

Content

• Technical Content
• Links to content
• Lab-manuals
• Code Samples and Project Files
• Windows Media Encoded Coding Walk-Through of Samples
• Extensibility Ideas
• This was shown, on your own what can you do.
• Potential to post these things in the INETAA Community
• Building a Student Community with INETAA
• Whitepaper on setting up a users-group
• FAQ INETA Speakers Bureau
• Resource Guide (How to Get Free Stuff)
• Interview with a Pro
• Career Profile
• Docs
• Application Developer
• Systems Administrator
• Technical Evangelist
• Security Analyst
• CEO
• Web-Developer
• Interviews with Industry Professionals about There Jobs
• Fame Shot (Photo)
• Microsoft "Exclusives"
• Information from MS Developers on MS
• Information on the MVP Program
• Information on MSDN and MSDN Student Flash
• Information on being a DCC
• Vender
• Misc. Freebies

Purpose

The IAA program is an INETA endorsed program that provides a structured framework and support line to establishing an alliance between Industry and Academia.  This program offers an annual award certification to INETA users-groups that meet the IAA standards by effectively establishing a hybrid community with a passion for educating and promoting Microsoft® .Net technologies.

I’d like to introduce the new Academic Marketing Manager for the INETA Academic Student Committee.  Her name is Lorraine Wolfe and she is extremely passionate about working with INETA and working with Users-Groups.

Lorraine graduated with honors from Bradley University in May of 2004.  She completed two majors, Advertising and Multimedia, and a minor, Graphic Design, in four years time.  She worked on the University’s yearbook The Anaga for two years shooting photos, writing copy, laying out yearbook spreads, and conducting interviews with professors and students.

To show her passion for the users-group community it’s best to show off her experience.  For the past year and a half, Lorraine has been actively involved supporting Bradley’s INETA group, buFusion.Net, as the all-encompassing marketing/advertising/design coordinator.  She generated ideas for the on-campus wireless access launch event and designed posters, flyers, and newspaper ads to help build up the launch.

In her position as the Academic Marketing Manager, she hopes to help the team accomplish its objectives first by creating a solid, functional logo for the IAA.  Then, by bringing her integrated marketing communications skills to the table, she will organize Alliance activities, design distributable information pieces, and help tie the organization together through the use of consistent, effective, creative communications.

My role as the Academic Student Committee Chair at INETA is to form a committee of top student leaders from around the world to represent the student ‘pulse’ of INETA.  This committee consists of an entire student support structure from web-designers to a marketing manager.  One of the major components of the Student Committee is the Regional Director.  These students manage the universities in their regions and determine the needs of their given region.  Furthermore, these students will help in feeding back to the INETA Professional side how they can better integrate with the student groups. 

Everyone is a critic...  I've posted quite a few gripes myself, but seldom posted any ideas for fixing anything.  Those of you who know me will realize that I believe in plans, outlines, frameworks, or whatever else you want to call it.  So, with that, I'm going to post a very rough draft of an ICF or Imagine Cup Framework.  A lot of this will be fairly abstract ideas that will allow for the program to mold to a fit as necessary.  Also, this will focus solely on the Software Design Competition, no use to have a scatter-shot framework when we all know what the main thing with IC is.

Purpose -- The Problem to be solved.

This year's Imagine Cup theme was “Smart Makes Every Day Life Easier...”  To incorporate this vision the IC planners placed restrictions such as: the app must include a web-service, perform progressively better over time, and run on a mobile device.  These are way too many restrictions and sort of the wrong way to do things.  End result: the competitions had many mobile device programs that were 'token' apps or applications that would have been better suited for a desktop platform or many had web-services in a place where a web-service didn't make sense.  So, if I were an IC planner what does this tell me?  This tells me that I defined a problem and the solution.  The implementation was defined ahead of time and was entirely too strict.  To emphasize this, here is a call-out to IC judges, how many of you physically checked teams' code to determine if they were really using a web-service?  That’s what I thought.

So, if I were to start looking at a theme for the next Imagine Cup what would I, Andrew Flick (a simple, highly in debt, college student) propose?  How about a problem category (built of course using the .Net platform)?

• Technology Improves the Medical Industry
• Technology Improves the Transportation Industry
• Technology Improves the Tech Industry
• Technology Improves Education
• Technology Improves Security

You're looking at the potential of students solving critical problems while still leaving room for imagination to create unique solutions.  Doing things that even if they don't take the World Prize may still have a huge impact on society.  Now that's not trivial, but eventually you may run out of ideas for categories, so you could do 1 of 2 things.  Narrow each general category down, so fixing Air Transportation or focus on the problems of the time, such as technology helping under-privileged kids get a better educational experience. 

So, that's my thoughts on defining a purpose of the competition.

Timeframe -- The ever shifting deadline

Ok, we know that this year’s time frame for Imagine Cup out-right stunk.  So, I'm not going to elaborate on that.  I will briefly sum up my thoughts on making a successful time frame.

Incremental Deadlines and by Deadlines, I mean final solid deadlines.

First and foremost, the academic calendar or an average of one (in case you aren’t in college or forgot about this thing).

                        Fall                              Spring

Begin               September                    February

Mid-Terms        End of October             End of March

Finals               December                     May

So, we have a two part competition; however, allow enough flexibility for students to jump in at the last minute.  Fall Semester teams compete online in a design tournament (This gives them feedback for the next round).  Spring the whole thing Proof of Concept and all (After all at this stage POC is the most important thing, how many judges looked at the 5 page OneNote spec-sheet at the regional competition??).  Students don't have to compete in the design tournament, they can just jump in with the whole thing at the last minute if they want, but at least we are able to establish a first time deadline to get a rough estimate of teams competing.  (In other words, they have to put some thought into it.)  A disclaimer must be that implementation can take a last place design (idea) team to a first place team.  With that in mind November would be a good time for a design competition and April seems to work well for an implementation competition.  (Those months are comparable with the in-between mid-terms and finals time.)  An added bonus of doing it this way is that the really motivated students now have all Christmas break to do some implementation work.  Finally, the idea behind letting teams jump in at the last minute allows for second-semester starting students or the stereotypical “wait till the night before to pull it all together teams” (I disavow any knowledge of having done something like that..err hearing about that happening) to compete.

Prizes  -- $25K not enough?

No, $25K is not enough...not if you have to go through four rounds to get it.  The whole idea of incremental prizes needs to be emphasized, especially the concept of nobody going home empty handed (especially after the initial stage).  So, what I'm trying to get at is students need to feel that a prize is attainable and worth competing for(that is if that’s why the student is competing).  Other prizes: more involvement with industry (never know an idea may turn into a job or a sale) and increased visibility (would it be too much to ask to place a link on MS's homepage?).

Judges -- How about some consistency?

So, I've heard and seen judging issues.  My solution, make sure that every judge is on the same page as to requirements and standards.  Easy to say...how?  INETA, each event should have at least one INETA judge.  This person should be well-versed in the competition and be able to work with the other judges to achieve a consistent judging standard.  Ok, enough job descriptions...INETA is equipped to do this and should take the dominant role.  They are industry and they are .Net-knowledgeable.

Competition Format

My best solution to cut out all the excess time is to go straight to the major presentation.  Every team has say 25 min. on the big screen to make their sales pitch (at a given time slot).  After making the pitch they go to the science fair setup, the judges/customers can then go around and get clarification from the teams on any concerns they may still have.  The judges go to deliberate and the students are treated with a number of options (especially at regional+ levels), they can attend a couple different technical presentations or maybe even partake in a x-box game party or lan party (holy cow, the number of people with computers and with games at the regional competition was pretty intense.  We had the games, we had the network, all we needed was a little coordination....ok, I'm done geekin').

Okay, that's enough.  This post is long enough.  That and I want to keep this pretty abstract without saying 100% how everything should be done, I’ll leave that up to the IC planners…good luck!

Game Day.  Leave Peoria at 6:30 a.m. and head for the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.  My initial impression, “so this is what a computer science department is supposed to look like...wow.”  My second impression, (download speeds of 2 MB/sec) “I thought hitting over 100 KB/sec was good.”  Here's the break-down:

Format -- Long and Boring

Round 1

We have two rooms with approximately 10 teams in each.  We have two judges, one judge short.  Each team gets 20 minutes with a single judge.  That means the first round lasts about 4 hours (adding time for the judges to take a break).  Gripe #1 -- That's a long time to sit there and wait...  If I were running things: coordinate more demonstrations to be at the event besides just the mobility road show.  Invite industry in to check out these sweet apps.  Organize a LAN-Party while you wait.  Finally, schedule anyone?  Judge A will be at your booth at 10:20, you have until them to do what ever you want.

Round 2

10 Teams go home.  Their award for traveling from who knows where to have the honor to compete...nothing.  Gripe #2 -- Every team that competed in this competition should have left with something.  Traveling to this event came out of their own pockets (We are college students...).  We have 10 teams left, each team will get 10 minutes with the other judge.  Do the math; we have another long wait with nothing to do, except maybe make enhancements on our project (if we have an implementation).  The judges deliberate and 5 more teams go home, empty handed.

Final Round

5 teams give a presentation in front of everyone; the other competing teams get dirty and tear the competition to shreds.  This was pretty interesting, you could see what everyone else did or didn't do.  My thoughts were...hey judges forget the marketing B.S. this is a programming competition at this stage everyone should have a decent proof of concept.  I don't care if half of it doesn't work, just show me the demo!

Judges  -- We don't need no stinkin' security.

I don't know what to say here.  Gripe #3: Teams lacking an implementation and beating teams with an implementation.  Last time I saw the judging sheet an implementation was 20% or so of the final score...  By far my biggest gripe is this: security/privacy.  A good idea is fine, but there must be ways to make the app implementible in a secure fashion.  So, why in the hell was there no focus on security/privacy that deals directly into the potential of app being used.  Case and Point: a judge’s suggestion to my team.  “You have a web-service that allows a hospital to locate doctors by location, specialty, etc.  What I'm disappointed in with your app is that you didn't implement a mobile client so that I as a potential patient can access this service and locate on my smart phone where the doctors are.”  Earth to Judge: have you ever considered privacy considerations??  That's exactly what the doctors want.  Case Scenario: My heart hurts; hey we have a cardiologist eating dinner down the road. let me go see him.  Wow!  Another app gave the ability to open locked doors by security clearance by voice recognition...notice not voice authentication. 

The Fall of AMPS

AMPS made it to the final round and we were to give a presentation.  We started writing the presentation right after we found out we made it to this round.  We felt the app spoke for itself, but we jumped on the band-wagon and threw a few slides together.  So after giving my presentation, I have multiple other teams coming up and saying that my app rocked and that they thought we'd take the prize.  Unfortunately, the judges disagreed and placed us in third.  So, I left the competition after winning my 4th Pocket PC.  The overall experience was long, boring, and lacking of a nail-biting competitive edge. 

The Winning Teams

1st Place Winner -- A method for tracking how a 6-8 grade student wrote on a tablet pc.  Tracks smiley faces, pressure on pad, and angle of the pen to sort of psychoanalyze the student.  Implementation: a program that asked the user a question recognized the ink and sent back to the client if the answer was correct.  (The second place winner stated that for the next round he will implement a cure cancer button and say that he didn't get it debugged in time.)

2nd Place Winner -- A team for configuring LDAP on a web-page, security for this user-name and password...don't set your tablet down.  Major selling points, drag and drop capabilities (provided by Infragistics -- that was not made public); voice recognition to open doors.  I'm not sure how those two worked together, sort of a random conglomerate of stuff.

3rd Place Winner -- Automated Medical Paging System. 

In Short -- The Good (+); The Bad (--); The Perplexing (?)

(+) Some really cool Ideas.

(+) 2.0 MB/sec Download Speeds.

(--) Some really cool ideas with no implementation.

(--) Internet Connection Guest Account Timing Out Every 3 Min.

(?) Teams wearing suits and ties!?!?!

My team was competing at the round 1 competition for Imagine Cup.  The host location: Bradley University; Peoria, IL; The Student Center Grand Ballroom.  The schools competing in this competition included Bradley University and Bradley's biggest rival Illinois State University. 

Event Night: The match-up consists of 4 teams from Bradley and ISU chickened out and sent none claiming not enough time to prepare.  So, scratch the earlier comment it was only Bradley fighting Bradley.  The event format consisted of utilizing 3 judges.  Each of the judges was to receive a special token of appreciation, such as Microsoft Office.  This was such a grand phenomenon that a fourth judge showed up to the competition unannounced and uninvited, however, he sure wanted his copy of Office.  (Not sure where he came from.) 

The Competing Teams consisted of: a team that would utilize WiFi hotspots to alert everyone on the network that was running their app of a person in trouble; a team that would use the pocket pc to control a sort of music download center or juke box; a team that would use a pocket pc to control toy trains, and a team that would use a location service to locate doctors and then page them based on their specialty, health-care plan, and proximity to the hospital (my team).

The competition of four teams lasted from 7:00 - 10:00, practically an hour of love per team.  The feedback, I've gotten from the teams was that the event was extremely long, too long.  (Not that it bothered me; it was evening party time at the MVP summit.)

So, my round one experience consisted of socializing with fellow MVP's.  However, the end result sent my team on to Round 2 and made each of my team members about $33.33 richer.  Stay Tuned for the round two post, which will consist of a lot more gripes because I was there.