As most people know, Concerto uses SVN for version control.  Its worked really well for everything that I’ve needed it to, and I have no reason to complain or dislike it.  I’ve started to play around with Git for my work on the bonsai-video project and I like some of what I see.  The ability to commit locally and then send it up to the main server is a neat feature… though I’m not sure why I would every want to not push my changes to the server right away… its still neat to have the “offline” support.

The coolest thing about git isn’t even a feature of git itself, its github.com.  I really like the social components introduce into the programming area.  People can freely make their own copy of the code and start doing their own stuff… with a moderately useful web interface to tie it all together.  Typically I would download the source code for a program, make my changes locally, and call it a day.  With github there is an easy way to share those changes with others without having to formally submit a patch to the maintainers.

This social coding stuff makes me think twice about my general dislike for git and I’ve actually considered looking to switch Concerto to GitHub.  It has nothing to do with git vs svn at all actually, if the site was SVNHub we might already be there…well maybe not, there is also the issue of locally hosted vs remotely hosted repositories.  Github would certainly be a quick and easy way to track what other people are doing with their own copies of Concerto.

On another note, this past weekend we’ve finished work on the Concerto public site: http://www.concerto-signage.com which means you can finally download Concerto and start to do cool things with it!  For those of you who don’t know, Concerto is an open-source digital signage system that was developed at RPI.  I’ve been working on it since the spring of 2007 and I’m glad to see its being publicly released for everyone to enjoy.  If you just want to check out what you can do with it, the demo page has instructions to login to a demo system we’ve setup.  If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it!

This year it seems the commitee is worried about a decreasing number of students attending 4 year colleges. The Guidance Department spokesperson offer the fact that many students move on from 2 year schools to 4 year schools in an effort to justify the shift in numbers, citing increaseing financial pressure on the middle class. I don’t doubt that those circumstances may be the case, but I’ve always found the method this information is gathered to be very strange. I think graduating seniors are surveyed twice ever. Once before they leave, and once in December of the following year when the come back to speak about their experiences. Every year guidance says how challenging it is to get students to respond to their surveys to collect accurate data. I also know that only sampling a population twice isn’t a very accurate way of capturing the results of 12 years of education.

What I’ve never seen the high school done is contact students in a way thats convient for them. I remember getting my survey from the high school.. via mail. My mom kept it on top of my bureau until I got home and was able to fill it out. I wouldn’t expect every parent to do that, and how many kids actually know how to work the mail these days. The high school should really embrace technology to make this process much easier for them, but more importantly for the students.

Social networks like Facebook and MySpace make it very easy to track classmates. If you’re not “friends” with them, you could at least send them a message or identify what their current network is. I know that if I was sent a survey electronically to my email or facebook I would respond. I would probably respond to a survey 10 years from now. I doubt I’m completely alone. Sure, you won’t get 100% participation, but there are lots of people out there who will take 2 minutes to answer 5 questions if they know what its about.

I’m not saying graduates should be placed on a SPAM mailing list to send surveys out every few years, but social networks are keeping our social graphs from high school for some time after our graduation. I’m still friends with many people from South Hadley High School that I haven’t seen in years.

There is no miracle solution to get data from people after they graduate, but if you try to collect it in a way thats friendly to them… you’re certainly more likely to get something back. If I were incharge of implementing this, I might do a few things. 1: Get a facebook group going. Most schools already have something like this going on. 2. Create a 1 page web based survey. Something dead simple that takes under 5 minutes to figure out. 3. Distribute that web survery to members of the group. Have friends pass it along. If you want to get really fancy, attach some reward and send it out pyramid-scheme style. Boom. Instant data.

I’m going to check my email. I doubt there is anything there is any survey there asking if I’ve graduated my two year school yet, or if I’m still attending my four year college.