This is: Haitham A. El-Ghareeb, Assistant Teacher in Faculty of Computers and Information Sciences in Mansoura University.

I have been reading and thinking about Wikis for a long time. I can not deny the truth that I have been so interested about them, but I could not help myself thinking: What shall I do with a wiki? Though I am really interested in wikis, I did not want to have one just for having one. I wanted to have one and make this one really useful.

The thing started when I was surfing the internet, and I read the following technical report. It describes how master students of the SEI at CMU used wikis as an architectural documentation tool while working in a project with Siemens corporation, and I liked the idea. This technical report talks intensively about the advantages and limitations of using wikis as an architectural documentation tool. I found many things I have felt myself while reading the technical report.

One of the things that makes me sick is the inability to make graduation project teams follow each other steps and complete the non-complete roads. Many of the graduation projects I have been working with till now start from scratch. I have been working on many technical aids to solve this problem. The first thing I thought about was providing the graduation project documentations to the fresh students. You can find some of them here. But, that was not the best choice because: most of the documentations are out dated, besides they do not describe the real project. As expected, students do not spend time documenting their analysis and design and start immediately coding ( I will not call that Agile). Thus, we have tons of non-useful documentations.

I then thought about the Digital Library project. I thought about providing the digital content of all the graduation projects and moving them out of the CDs, so they are reusable and students can search and utilize them. But again, the thing is not working perfectly because of many reasons. I was shocked when I checked the documentations we have in the faculty. Most of them is such a (copy and paste) activity from the internet, and there is no real productivity.

I was shocked, and started to loose hope in being able to make students that did not meet before work on continuing projects. I believe this is the only way to make students produce something useful: They have to build on each other experiences.

Almost before I loose hope, I read the technical report I told you about in the beginning and the idea came to me. I believe now I was loading myself to be the connector to all those graduation projects. I have to work deeply and closely with the students of each graduation project, then I have to receive all the databases and source code, then deliver all that stuff to the fresh students, explain it to them, then start discussions and long talks, and finally receive nothing because no one wants to continue whatever her/his college started and we begin from scratch reaching to the same point. That was really frustrating. Add to this, student's laziness. Once students know they have a supervisor on the project, they start moving all the tasks to her/him, they start not producing anything, and immediately, they stop working once the supervisor tells them 'I will not be able to come and meet you today'. They start yelling 'we can not find you, we can not find anyone to work with us and help us, you were not there, you are responsible for not making us a productive team, and bla bla bla'

Those times are over to me. I will stop loading myself with things I am not interested in. Now, I will begin working according to my interests. I will have a schedule, a plan, a specified list of requirements, and projects to be available. Whomever want to join me, they are welcome. I will not work anymore with teams based on their requirements, I will work according to my requirements. I am sorry to say I will not seek their comfort anymore, business is business, and so graduation projects are. Who works, gets the mark, and who does not, does not. If there is someone that has to work hardly to cope with the otherone, that someone has to be the student. I will stop considering social and techinal capabilities of students; because while I was doing so I was the looser. I can not forget all the experiements I had with all the students I worked with. Though most of them were respectful, dealing with them was not an easy task. I am making my plan right now, I hope I will be productive with the graduation projects I will work with next year.

This wiki will hold my plans of working, and the projects I will be working on for the next some years. I am tired of working on projects that terminates before they produce the required deliverables. This wiki is the documentation, with no repeat, and no (copy and paste) activity. I will be editing it myself. I hope through this wiki, I will be able to make use of all the graduation projects I worked with, documentations I have written, edited, supervised, and read, and all the people I meet daily.

What is my dream? My dream is to work on a research activity that continues, deliver a respectable deliverables, and produce those output through well managed technological and managerial activities, using high tech innovations, and serving community with respectable ongoing research.