RailsConf code drive

[Audrey Eschright]

At RailsConf this year (held at the Oregon Convention Center, 5/29-6/1) Chad Fowler is organizing a community project code drive--essentially a big hackfest. Details are at http://www.chadfowler.com/2008/2/2/railsconf-community-project-code-drive. I've been thinking about putting Calagator on the list of potential projects for people to work on. It's not clear yet whether folks who aren't registered for the conference will be able to attend this part, though. I think the completely open nature of our code sprints is important, so that could be an issue.

However--it would be cool to have people from outside the local area take a look at what we've done, and maybe contribute to some of the harder problems (like duplicate squashing). What does everyone else think?

--

Audrey Eschright

lifeofaudrey.com

[Reid Beels]

I wonder if there's a possibility of working something out with
O'Reilly like what was done for OSCAMP last year with free limited
access badges for participants.

[Anselm Hook]

> However--it would be cool to have people from outside the local area take a
> look at what we've done, and maybe contribute to some of the harder problems
> (like duplicate squashing). What does everyone else think?

Sure, that would be fun - would be interesting to get even more input too.

On duplicates squashing specifically; what are the thoughts about how
to tackle this? It might make sense to try some of the obvious things
{ duplicate title, url etcetera } but to then also try things such as
comparative document analysis on shared keywords using contextual
network graphs and the like?

a

[Sam Keen]

On Feb 7, 2008 5:36 PM, Reid Beels <rei...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I wonder if there's a possibility of working something out with
> O'Reilly like what was done for OSCAMP last year with free limited
> access badges for participants.

Thats a great Idea Reid,
I organized the OSCAMP last year with O'Reilly. It had limited
success. The 'barcamp' format just didn't seem to work well being
inside of the much larger OSCON. It was certainly valuable to the
folks who did show up (just not many showed up).
O'Reilly's ultimate goal though was to reach out to the local
community as much as possible while they were in town, so a Calagator
and/or community projects hackfest might actually be a better fit???
If we think it is worth pursuing, we can work out a few details and
then pitch to the O'Reilly folks I worked with last year.

any thoughts, suggestions??

-Sam K

[Sam Keen]

Has anyone played with fuzzy matching Names / Titles with Levenshtein distance?
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance ]
[ http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/levenshtein/ ]
I've only read about it, never put it into practice.

Just curious (it may not be practical/useful),
sam

>
> >
>

[Sam Keen]

Update,
I spoke with Allison of O'Reilly about the group's idea to re-purpose
the OSCAMP venue and they sound very favorable to the Idea.
She had actually been talking to Zak Greant at SCALE about just that
subject. Zak has some ideas he wants to discuss when he gets back
home in a few days.
I am actually flying out in the morning for a vacation that goes
through Feb 25th so until then I will only have intermittent access to
email but once I am back, I'll be available to help plan and organize
this and the railsconf event.

(sorry, I cannot make the next code sprint but I'll be back in the
loop come March)
cheers
-sam k

On Feb 7, 2008 5:36 PM, Reid Beels <rei...@gmail.com> wrote:
>

[Sam Keen]

UPDATE
spoke with Allison and the gears are turning for OSCamp2008 and
re-purposing it as a HackFest.
That being the case I have suggested a rename to OSHack 2008.
Do you guys think that is a more appropriate name??

Paraphrasing what she has given me so far...

"Yes, we're providing the space again. Zak and I spent some time talking
on the phone, about how to organize it, and what we'd like to do is
break it up into a series of 2 hour hackathons for different
communities, assigning them in advance so they get on the schedule.
Mozilla, Open Moko, and Seaside have already expressed an interest.

The goal would be to help communities recruit new developers, giving
them a chance to meet existing developers, and to learn a bit about the
project and how to get started. Every community would have the freedom
to use the space however they want. I'm going to try to trade the one
big OSCamp room for two smaller rooms, which would give us 14 sessions
total during the day. We could add another couple of sessions in the
evening to get up to 22 total sessions, if we get enough projects
signing up for it ..."

I let here know that locally, calagator.org definitely wants to be in the mix.

If you know of other community projects that could benefit, Let me
know. Also I will pass on the official registration site when we get
to that point.

Also they are asking for suggestions for additional events other that hackathons
I suggested lightning Demo sessions: 10-15min/no slides, just show
your product working.
Any other suggestions???

more to follow soon...

sam k

[Sam Livingston-Gray]

Are we talking about OSCON, RailsConf, or both?
-Sam

[Sam Keen]

so far this is just OSCON, not sure if Allison is involved in
RailsConf (I'll ask).

Is someone in contact with Chad Fowler or O'Reilly? (I was going to
look over http://www.chadfowler.com/2008/2/2/railsconf-community-project-code-drive
but his site looks to be down at this moment).

So I think we could take one of two approaches.
We could simply learn from how the RailsConf event goes and funnel
that into OSHack
or we could ask Chad and O'Reilly if they want to more tightly
integrate the two.
Thoughts ? Preferences ?

If we think we want to tightly integrate and you have some time to
devote to the organizing effort, send me your preferred email address,
that way we can be sure that those organizing the two events can be
cc'd on emails to O'Reilly, Chad, Zak....

-thanks,
Sam Keen