iFoundry Revealed sorta

In modeling iFoundry as a system, I have broken it down into pieces that makes the system as a whole easier to understand.  There were other things that I could have included in the system like the history and how it evolved, but I decided to make it simpler by only including things directly relevant to the operating of iFoundry at the moment.  The diagram itself is decently easy to understand.  There are various levels and sublevels starting with the founders and administrators of the overall program.  Using funding from the university, iFoundry (now more thought of as iEFX) is broken into subcategories.  There is the class part of iEFX and the iCommunity component.  The class has a lecture and lab weekly.  The iCommunity has a group iHouse meeting and then breaks up into individual iTeams.  Students participate in all of these and give feedback to the top of the chain with the administrators.  Students can also become ELA’s in the future who help with the labs while TA’s teach the lecture.  The entire purpose of the iFoundry is to take students from the Engineering Community, improve their engineering skills and put them back into the community with a deeper knowledge of what it means to be an engineer and how to best utilize their skills.  Whether or not this happens is debatable but the purpose is the same nevertheless.

To tell you the truth, I did not really gain that much insight from doing this analysis.  I already knew the system and this was just basically a way to organize my thoughts which I already knew.  Had this been a more complicated system, this probably would have helped much more.  I think the most interesting part of this diagram is at the bottom left where the purpose of iEFX is summed up.  iEFX takes students from the engineering community, teaches them how to be great engineers, then puts them back in the community with that knowledge.  The entire system is designed to do just that.  I don’t really see any unintended consequences that some entities actions might cause other than the feedback the students give.  If the feedback is bad, the top of the system needs to rethink the entire system.