My CDR (Critical Design Review) is due on Monday, so the weekend has been spent attempting to complete the remaining parts of the document. Last semester when my team and I wrote our PDR (Preliminary Design Review), we spent a hectic evening emailing word documents back and forth in an attempt to collaboratively produce a coherent document. The result was less than satisfactory (in fact I was rather embarrassed).

In an attempt to learn from past mistakes and apply a little knowledge from one of my Technical Communication classes, I came up with the brilliant idea to implement a Wiki to assist us with collaborating on our CDR. At this point, I am quite pleased with the results. I believe that when all is said and done, we will have managed to create a much more coherent and meaningful document while expending less work than before. Hurray, world wide web!

If you are curious (or bored), you can follow the progress of our CDR at the Senior Design Wiki. My only regret is that I didn’t create this site at the beginning of senior design; it would have served as an excellent repository for all the documents, notes, tests, and other odds and ends related to such a project. Oh well – we live and learn, right?

As a side note, if anyone is curious, I’m using DokuWiki, a very slim but powerful PHP-based Wiki software. And if you want to come to the presentation, it is scheduled for 1 PM on Wednesday, April 11th in room 204A of the Engineering Building at Mercer University.