Essay supervision system / packager needed

[bennett@nomolog.nagoya-u.ac.jp]

Here at Nagoya University, I have developed a document management tool that
may be interesting to other educators.  I call the system "Revision Forum".
I am looking for someone to make up Debian packages for it, so that we can
more easily share the system with other institutions.

You can see some sample text in the system here:

  http://blab.nomolog.nagoya-u.ac.jp/CW/owl

  ID: guest
  PW: guest

Here is a short description:

  - Revision Forum is a commenting system, that permits one user to submit a
    document and other users to attach comments to the text.
    
  - The user interface is provided by Zope.  Archival storage is held
    under Postgresql.  PDF output can be generated by pdflatex.

  - Documents are formatted using the ReStructured Text markup syntax (a
    plain-text format supported by the Python Docutils package).  The
    document can be anything from a simple paragraph to a chapter in a book
    for publication -- ReStructured Text is an industrial-strength format that
    supports footnotes, embedded graphics and other goodies.
    
  - Frequent comments can be stored for future use.
  
  - Commenters may tag their comments with a Creative Commons license,
    to permit reuse by textbook authors and others.

  - The system maintains a revision history for every document, together
    with their comments.

  - The system also exploits the freeware "copyfind" utility from
    University of Virginia to track common text between submitted
    essays -- useful when teaching large classes.

  - The current version is functional -- I am using it to supervise the work
    of 80 students at the moment.  But it is also experimental.  The system
    uses a minimal, custom spun content framework built in vanilla Zope.
    Eventually, it will be reengineered to work inside Plone.

We am currently looking for someone to distill our source into a set of Debian
packages that will smoothly install.  We intend to pay for this work (although
for bureaucratic reasons we must make payment to someone with a bank account
in Japan).

*Everyone* is welcome to take a look at the system on the above site. Anyone
interested in deploying it locally, or in working on bringing it to Debian
should please contact me directly by email, on bennett@nomolog.nagoya-u.ac.jp.

Many thanks,

Frank Bennett
Faculty of Law
Nagoya University
JAPAN