DML’s wiki is all about the knowledge of the system. Its domain includes equipments, projects, members and requisitions, although others could be added to the list. The point of the system is to manage all the information in a dynamic, unbounded way, regardless of the content. This is possible due to the flexibility and collaborative capabilities provided by our wiki engine. This follows with other wikis, such as Python’s, Ubuntu’s, and of course, Wikipedia’s.

Roles

The wiki divides its users into 5 different levels:

• Administrator
• Manager
• Mentor/Teacher
• User/Student
• Visitor

These levels are cumulative, witch means the higher ones have the capabilities of the lower ones. The Administrator is the highest level.

Visitor

The visitors are all the users that access the wiki unauthenticated. They can see the content of equipments and projects, as long as they access the website inside the university network or via VPN.

User/Student

The student can edit information of most wiki pages, participating in the collaborative loop of information share. He can also be member of a (set of) project(s). Finally, he can do requisitions of equipments, in the context of one of the projects he belongs to. A student has full access to its account information as long as he has its UA credentials.

Mentor/Teacher

A teacher is the mentor of a project running inside MakerLab. Projects can be created by a teacher. After that, he can add students to it (who can also add other students), making them part of the project. This is MakerLab’s way of assigning responsibility of the scientific value of a given project, in this case to its mentor.

Manager

The manager is the person that supervises the room. He is responsible to look after the material and help to keep the room an enjoyable space. He can manage all the equipment in the wiki, creating/editing new pages for equipments, adding new units to them (the physical manifestation of a given item), and maintaining projects’ pages if the need rises.

Requisitions are tracked by the manager, who is also capable of manually editing them.

Being the mentor a special role, after authenticating himself via UA he needs to have this permission granted by the manager.

Administrator

The administration level is the highest level of the system. All the features are available to users with this role.

Authentication

Users can authenticate themselves with the system in a transparent way by using OAuth1, provided by UA. Completing its workflow is a requirement in order to login to the platform (which assumes the existence of UA credentials) — this means there is no need for an actual registration.

Management

The management is one of the main tools of the wiki. This section intends to develop the manager features.

Equipments

Equipments are registered in the wiki, which provides a template page with the last used fields (although the manager can edit the entire page to his needs). This avoids the existence of blank fields in a typical information system. For instance, links to images or datasheets can be added to each equipment on demanded, that is, withouth assuming that all items should contain this time of information associated. For each equipment, several units can be added.

Requisitions

The requisition of units happens through mobile apps. Despite this, the manager can track the complete requisition process, tracking pending requisitions and the requisition history, being able to contact the students via email.

Requisition process

The way the requisitions’ workflow processes is of extreme importance. We want to be sure that:

• Equipments are safe and well maintained — no damage, loss or thefts. If this happens someone needs to be responsibilized;
• Equipments are used in deserving projects.

The diagram below illustrates the procedure to do requisitions (inside the dashed box) as an easy and fast step, wrapped in a bigger process (the whole diagram).

Following all these steps we can trust in the paradigm of a system where everybody can enjoy learning and making, with the less bureaucracies possible, yet where when things go wrong the responsible doesn’t get away.