Project Ideas for the McNair Center

Allocating People

• Albert
• Carlin
• Rachel - Urban ecosystems?
• Komal - Social media, especially Twitter
• Meghana - Law and policy
• Julia - Graphics
• Iris - Local institutions (esp. Rice)
• David
• Jackie

IT needs

• Software dev:
  • Twitter engineer
  • Webcrawlers
• Infrastructure:
  • Hardware: Webserver, database server, sandbox, ???
  • Webserver, blog, wiki set-up and build inc. extensions (particularly security)

Ranking universities on their entrepreneurship ecosystems

We might want work out how to quantify university ecosystem performance. To start with, let's find out who ranks universities, what their methodologies are, and whether we can get their data.

Possible metrics:

• No. classes, students trained, degree of training
• Relevant faculty and experts
• No. start-ups by students, faculty/staff, and alums
  • And value created!
  • Resources provided (flex-space, fab shops, etc.)

This might also serve as a closed-system test-case for ranking urban ecosystems.

Lunch

We could do a monthly (?) lunch and invite alums. School of social science does one through the Gateway program. They invite 5 alums and a max of 25 students, and have 1 alum with 5 students. This isn't really networking, more life information. We could do something better?