[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Will the "coding hackfest" survey submissions be made available?

[Karen Schneider]

Dan, I will try to answer your question(s) clearly. Please let me know
if this works for you.

1. Submissions for the hackfest. Out  of 84 survey responses, there
were only three entries for hackfest suggestions, probably because the
survey question was phrased to measure interest (since the committee
was being careful with allocating resources), not tease out the
topics. The question was: "Check off any or all of these proposed
hackfests (or brainfests!) you might participate in on May 20."

There were four suggestions the survey offered for "hackfests or brainfests":

Half-day, high-level documentation discussion	
"Meet with a Developer" (half-hour time slots)	
Half-day Sysadmin Survival Skills	
Hands-on coding ("Classic Hackfest")

Then there was a comment box to add other ideas. Of the two relevant
submissions (one was an offtopic comment), one was "hooking into
Evergreen"--which feels consonant with the other ideas as a
high-level, half- or full-day sort of project. Then there was one
submission that wasn't clear it was a list of specific coding ideas:

"Back to the server: an accessible, crawlable, functional catalog
(with AJAX as a bonus instead of an essential core) !FAIL: build a
regression testing framework Stacking added content a la Ümläüt Me
talk LDAP one day ISBN10/ISBN13 equivalence NOW More than MARC:
indexing & searching other formats M8K3.MY C8LL numbers (L355)
abnormal! House of the RISing sun: native export to RefWorks et al
ruby.push "OpenSRF" <?php echo "OpenSRF"; ?>"

I think there was a suggestion in your post that in future conferences
the conference find a means to collectively discuss hackfest ideas
(and as someone who is not a developer I would expand that to include
the "anyfest" concept). This is a really good idea (the mailing lists
feel appropriate for that, yes?) and I would add that the Evergreen
wiki already has a place for suggestions for next year's conference.
We will also survey attendees after the conference but please don't
hesitate to add your ideas.

Regarding the time, the idea that the hackfest might reasonably start
later than 9 came from a couple of developers who commented to me that
they didn't really expect to get started at 9. But we have a crew on
site tomorrow working hard to make sure the resources are
appropriately configured and available at 9, and then it will be up to
individuals to be there or not as their body clocks determine. Does
that work for you?

-- 
-- 
| Karen G. Schneider
| Community Librarian
| Equinox Software Inc. "The Evergreen Experts"
| Toll-free: 1.877.Open.ILS (1.877.673.6457) x712
| kgs at esilibrary.com
| Web: http://www.esilibrary.com
| Be a part of the Evergreen International Conference, May 20-22, 2009!
| http://www.lyrasis.org/evergreen


Does this work for you?

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 9:19 PM, Dan Scott <denials at gmail.com> wrote:
> As noted in the description of the inaugural hackfest at Access 2002
> (http://www.access.uwindsor.ca/units/access/main.nsf/hackfest?OpenForm)
> and described in the One Big Library podcast episode about the Access
> 2006 hackfest (http://onebiglibrary.net/geeks/episode/006-access-hackfest),
> part of the magic of a hackfest is that ideas for cool projects are
> solicited in advance; the project ideas are unveiled at the beginning
> of the hackfest; participants indicate what projects they would like
> to tackle and self-organize into smaller groups; and then the groups
> work on those projects in a good-natured competition for the remainder
> of the day (occasionally jumping projects, moaning about connectivity
> or the lack thereof, and generally engaging in chaotic behaviour that
> nonetheless drives brilliant results).
>
> A key part of this, of course, is the project ideas. As part of the EG
> conference survey, I had submitted ten or so ideas for coding hackfest
> projects. Has someone taken responsibility for collecting all of those
> hackfest ideas together and making them available at the start of the
> hackfest?
>
> I ask only because a previous version of the "coding hackfest" bullet
> point stated that a room would be available at 9:00 but questioned
> whether anything would happen before 10:00 - which worries me a bit
> that apart from facilities, which are greatly appreciated, this
> hackfest might be leaning a bit too much on the chaotic side at the
> moment (or, alternately, it might be better called a "gathering of
> Evergreen developers" - which is fine in and of itself, but it is
> different from Access-style hackfests).
>
> --
> Dan Scott
> Laurentian University
>