In March of 2007 Dow initiated the Methane Challenge to identify new processes in methane conversion. The Challenge involved an open invitation to researchers, universities, and companies to submit proposals to Dow in the hopes of being awarded a research grant. Before this could happen, Dow needed a way to receive these proposals, track them, communicate internally between the various administrators at Dow, and communicate with the Challenge participants, while keeping all communications regarding a proposal together in one place. Using PHP and MySQL I created a sophisticated system for receiving proposals and track communications related to the proposals.
The whole process started with a form on Dow’s Methane website where interested participants submitted their contact information and uploaded a file detailing their proposal. The form was submitted to a PHP script that parsed the form, added it to the database, and sent off notification emails to the Challenge administrators and a confirmation email to the sender. The Challenge administrators logged into the secure management portal to see a list of all submitted proposals, proposal statuses, lead investigators, and links to the proposal detail pages.
The proposal detail page is where the real magic of the management portal happened. The Challenge administrators could view the entire proposal, along with any upload files, change the status and lead investigator for the proposal, and through a blog-like comment system could respond to the proposal for other administrators to see or choose to email the response to the proposal owner for further comment. Responses from the proposal owner were sent to an email account that was monitored by a server script that parsed the emails in the account and added them to the database as replies to the appropriate proposal, also allowing for file attachments.
During the life of the Methane Challenge over 100 proposals were received and managed through the portal.
Related Page: Dow Chemical Awards "Methane Challenge" Grants
