[Sugar-devel] The quest for data

[Sameer Verma]

On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 5:03 PM, Andreas Gros <andigros72 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Great utilization of CouchDB and its views feature! That's definitely
> something we can build on. But more importantly, to make this meaningful, we
> need more data.

I like this approach as well because the aggregation is offloaded to
CouchDB through views and reduce/rereduce so we can have a fairly
independent choice of Javascript-based visualization frontend, be it
Google Charts (https://developers.google.com/chart/) or D3.js
(http://d3js.org/).

> It's good to know what the activities are that are used most, so one can
> come up with a priority list for improvements, and/or focus developer
> attention.
> CouchDB allows to pull data together from different instances, which should
> make aggregation and comparisons between projects possible. And for projects
> that are not online, the data could be transferred to a USB stick quite
> easily and then uploaded to any other DB instance.
>

True. CouchDB will allow for aggregation across classes, schools,
districts, etc. Depending on the willingness of participation of
different projects, we can certainly go cross-project. Even if these
views are not made public, they will be useful. For instance, I would
love to compare my Jamaica projects with my India projects with my
Madagascar projects.

> Is there a task/todo list somewhere?
>

Not that I know of, but we can always start one on the sugarlabs wiki.
Anybody have suggestions?

Sameer

> Andi
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> On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 11:16 AM, Sameer Verma <sverma at sfsu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 4:15 AM, Martin Abente
>> <martin.abente.lahaye at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hello Sameer,
>> >
>> > I totally agree we should join efforts for a visualization solution,
>> > but,
>> > personally, my main concern is still a  basic one: what are the
>> > important
>> > questions we should be asking? And how can we answer these questions
>> > reliably? Even though most of us have experience in deployments and
>> > their
>> > needs, we are engineers, not educators, nor decision makers.
>> >
>>
>> Agreed. It would be helpful to have a conversation on what the various
>> constituencies need (different from want) to see at their level. The
>> child, the parents/guardians, the teacher, the
>> principal/administrator, and educational bureaucracy. We should also
>> consider the needs of those of us who have to fundraise by showing
>> progress of ongoing effort.
>>
>> > I am sure that most of our collection approaches cover pretty much the
>> > trivial stuff like: what are they using, when are they using it, how
>> > often
>> > they use it, and all kind of things that derive directly from journal
>> > metadata. Plus the extra insight that comes when considering different
>> > demographics
>>
>> True. Basic frequency counts such as frequency of use of activities,
>> usage by time of day, day of week, scope of collaboration are a few
>> simple one. Comparison of one metric vs the other will need more
>> thinking. That's where we should talk to the constituents.
>>
>> >
>> > But, If we could also work together on that (including the trivial
>> > questions), it will be a good step forward. Once we identify these
>> > questions
>> > and figure out how to answer them, it would be a lot easier to think
>> > about
>> > visualization techniques, etc.
>>
>> If the visualization subsystem (underlying tech pieces) are common and
>> flexible, then we can start with a few basic templates, and make it
>> extensible, so we can all aggregate, collate, and correlate as needed.
>> I'll use an example that I'm familiar with. We looked at CouchDB for
>> two reasons: 1) It allows for sync over intermittent/on-off
>> connections to the Internet and 2) CouchDB has a "views" feature which
>> provides selective subsets of the data, and the "reduce" feature does
>> aggregates. The actual visual is done in Javascript. Here's the
>> example Leotis had at the OLPC SF summit
>> (http://108.171.173.65:8000/).
>> >
>> > What you guys think?
>> >
>>
>> A great start for a great year ahead!
>>
>> > Saludos,
>>
>> cheers,
>> > tch.
>> Sameer
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