We have stumbled upon a great topic for a student web app software design project (hello Southampton, Solent, Bournemouth, Portsmouth), here’s a 5 min overview of how it goes…

A sailing club has a dinghy pound. In it are ~200 dinghies and trailers.
Spaces are purchased on a 6 month or 12 month basis.
The input is a pile of paper forms with ‘Paid’ and ‘Dated’ stamps, some example fields are Name, Email, Boat Type, Boat Name, Boat Number.

Spaces are allocated on a first come first served basis.
There is a waiting list if required.

If spaces are not occupied within 2 months of being allocated, they can be re-possessed and allocated to the waiting list.

Spaces vary in size, so not all boats can go in all spaces (both length and width wise).
Spaces are labeled by a letter and number, letters A – F, numbers 1 – 22.

1) Elaborate on this outline.
2) Design a web app (options: LAMP,Ruby,NoSQL,Laravel etc) to show a map of the spaces, searchable by any field.

Stretch goals:

1) Also take a data feed of how many races the boats participate in, and allocate frequent sailors spaces at the front of the pound.
2) Have an online tool whereby users can see a map of the pound, and a database of the boats. Allow them to communicate based on pound space or boat details. The aim being that users can communicate without sharing email addresses.
3) Have online payment so that each space can be bought online.
4) Enable a way to view space allocation for previous seasons.
5) Photo enabled ‘stock take’ so that the pound warden can document what is in the pound.
6) X-ray detector to see the pound stickers through the boat covers (that one’s very optional).