Vulture's Eye

Group Members

• Donald Guy
• Vincent Lee
• Sarah Lehmann
• Chris Merrill

• TA: [Insert TA Here]

Problem Statement

Currently, MIT has two mailing lists that are used to publish the availability of free food or free items that they don't need anymore (but that others might).  These mailing lists (free-food and reuse) are useful for these purposes, but it is often difficult to determine salient information regarding which posts are near you, or to decode whether these posts contain what you want (as the subject line is only sometimes useful).

Facets of the current setup that are problematic include:

1. It is difficult to determine the geographic relevance of free-food or reuse emails.
2. It is often difficult to determine the content of the posts without extensive searching.
3. It is hard to tell if a food post has been claimed by other people.
4. There doesn't exist a predictive model to help people looking for free food or items determine the most likely locations and times for free item posts.

Target Users

1. Posters
   1.  Motivation is to get rid of cruft or food quickly due to circumstances (e.g. "We don't have the Bush Room reserved past 10!")
   2.  
2. Casual reusers
   1. Incentive to use is to acquire specific items or classes of items
   2. Searches for items
3. Competitive reusers
   1. Incentive to use is to get an edge on competition by getting served metadata in at-a-glance form
   2. Looks at live-updating, general map
   3. Uses type tagging
   4. Needs lots of efficiency

All of the above groups exist in a community which is relatively proficient in computer technology.

Proposed Solution

Let's not get ahead of ourselves there, pardner.

GR1 - Task Analysis