Constraints.

There are two major constraints:

• We don't have any budget so far and must therefore bootstrap this project with volunteer labor. (So we must leverage stuff that already exists and must embrace tools that we already know and/or want to learn for other reasons.)
• It won't be used if faculty, TAs, and graders find it difficult to learn and/or use. It has must involve a minimal change to current ways of doing and thinking about instructional interactions, e.g., faculty should be able to prepare materials using whatever editor they are used to using.

Since most of these transactions are contained in files or directories of files that are prepared by students, faculty, TAs, and graders, we envision a file repository indexed by a database of metadata. We will however need some utilities to split files into their components, e.g., directories of e-mail or a file generated by scanning all the students' answer-sheets for a quiz.