[TOS] Automating the POSSE admissions process: what needs doin'

[Mel Chua]

The current POSSE admissions cycle process takes a lot of time and 
manual slog on the admin side. Most of it is repetitive and could be 
done by a robot - so I wrote up the stuff I'd like automated so somebody 
(Ian Weller by default, but he's a little swamped with other 
infrastructure/development stuff, so I'm sure help would be welcome) can 
script 'em up.

http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Talk:POSSE_2009#Automating_the_application_process 
is a rough description of the problem spec - it's basically "here are 
the manual steps I go through, exactly in order, to process 
applications... now write a script to do them."

A lot of this involves hooking limesurvey (which exports to 
easily-parseable csv) and the TOS wiki together, and figuring out how to 
send automatic emails with certain variables filled in. I think that 
pymediawiki (a bit of python code that lets you write bots that edit 
mediawiki according to rules you specify) will be a helpful thing here, 
and beyond that I'm not sure, but would love to hear suggestions/ideas.

--Mel