IBM University Relations runs a program called "Remote Mentoring" (Now called "Global Remote Mentoring") where an IBMer mentors a bunch of college students to complete their academic project. The name remote comes from the fact that the students do not come and work at IBM premises. They use their own personal / college computing resources to work on the project. The project is jointly mentored by a faculty at the college and one or more IBMer. Interestingly, the program runs round the year and the duration depends on number of students, scope of work, academic requirement and several other factors. The project statements most often come from the IBMer who acts as the mentor and intent is to produce something useful for IBM resulting in an asset, white-paper, developerWorks article, patent etc. etc. The IBM software that is required as part of the project is made available through the Academic Initiative website that allows the student / college to download the software from the IBM website.
I proposed a project last year along with my college Amit Kumar (more popular as Amit Kumar33, as his IBM ID is Amit Kumar33/India/IBM.......... :--) ) where we wanted to build a solution on top of Lotus Connections (now IBM Connections) which will accelerate the adoption of Social Software in an Academic Institution. As part of this effort the 5 students from Cummins College of Engineering, Pune developed widgets that had following use cases / functionality implemented
- A Survey
- A poll
- A Calender / Time Table (lectures, practicals, holidays.. etc.)
- An Election
- Campus Placements
- A Quiz
