volunteer project - anyone interested?

[Max]

Hi all,

I am a member of a committee at the St. John the Baptist elementary
school which is planning an upgrade (complete rebuild) of their
website. There's an admin currently who has the site built on a CMS
system he has built over the years and we are hopefully going to go in
a completely new direction (rails). There isn't much of a budget but
it's an opportunity to give to the school (a non-profit) and help out
so I thought I'd reach out to the community and see if there is any
interest in putting a team together to tackle this (IF they decide
they'd like to go in that direction).

I'm writing this to see what kind of interest there is from the local
ruby community to get involved. Is anyone interested in teaming up
and working on this together? If you want more info on some of the
requirements give me a ring or drop me an email and i'll fill you in
on all i have at this point.

thanks for your time.

Max

[Matthew Nielsen]

No one's replied to this yet it seems, but I like the idea. I don't know if you were meaning just having a few people get together and tackle it or have it be a group project by URUGas a whole, but I like the idea that we all pitch in as a group and then have something that can be used as a teaching tool for our URUG meetings as well as helping the community.

> --
> Utah Ruby Users Group
> ur...@googlegroups.com
> http://utruby.org
> http://bit.ly/urug_lunches
> http://groups.google.com/group/urug/
> - All meeting times and places can be found here.
>
> ** Please prefix your subject with "[JOB]" if your message is about job opportunities.

[Justin Shakespear]

I may be in.

[Robert Karlsson]

I'd like to help w dev  (tho i'm a newbie), though the amount may depend upon time/place

My suggestion is to make it a github opensource project. Surely more than one school

needs better tools.

[Keith Kelsch]

Let me know if interested in a third party communication vehicle with a fundraising component and other commercial connections to the local community. I am a former high school teacher turned social entrepreneur. If there is something we can build inside our community service engine to reach out into your community better than an isolated CMS or other in-house system, let me know. Where is your school located? 

Keith R Kelsch
President at HotZing LLC
435-705-4767 Cell
Keith...@hotzing.com
www.hotzing.com

--

[Max]

The school is St John The Baptist Elementary in Draper Utah. It is
part of a larger campus but the site for the project is currently just
the elementary school. if it goes well they will probably want to
expand the site, or create (at least) 2 more sites for the middle and
high schools.

SJB (St John the Baptist) is part of the Salt Lake diocese which has a
number of other campuses so there's the possibility that others may
want it later (and the possibility then of some revenue but it would
still be very limited if at all)

There are many issues - not the least of which is privacy and this may
preclude it being an open-source, non-private repository project (at
least at the beginning). They are very careful when it comes to kids
and information and will lean (very far) on the side of caution
there. Their reasoning may or may not make sense from a technical
perspective as they don't have the IT knowledge but it is the way it
is in those kinds of bureaucracies so we'd have to be mindful of that.

Please note: I am just reaching out to see if there's interest in
helping at this point. no one has told me to go forward and there are
other hurdles to cross still... I didn't want to tell them that our
community was interested in helping unless there were some available
resources (I'm not willing to do it all on my own at this point -
"mama" would kill me).

Part of their goal with the site is definitely linked with marketing
the school(s) and fund-raising if possible so there may be some
interest in that but I know they will want to be "classy" about how
they do any kind of public out-reach.

thanks for the feedback and interest. I figured some of you would
like to be involved - it's appreciated. I'll let you know if/when i
hear back from them.

Max

[David Richards]

Why don't we organize a hack day for this?  We can set a time and a place and spend a half-day getting this going.  I could bring myself and probably one other (a new programmer I'm taking under my wing).  Also, I'd be happy to bring drinks.  Even if it's only 3 or 4 of us that show up, that could give the project a shot in the arm.  Then, let's post some of the successes from the group to URUG and build interest that way.  How does that sound?

I'd suggest a Saturday.  Maybe June 2nd at 10:00 AM at some location of your choosing?

On Saturday, May 12, 2012 2:00:10 PM UTC-6, Max wrote:

[JT Zemp]

This would be a perfect fit for a group that meets together to work on hacking skills (http://www.meetup.com/skillhack/). They get together a couple times a month at the Miller Entrepreneurship Center in their startup incubator space to work on improving development, design and business skillz.

I helped organize the first one, but Seth Jenks, who is doing the organizing these days, would possibly love to help. There's a decent chance he'd lend his awesome design skills to the cause as well.

So, if you think this would be a great learning opportunity and collaboration, suggest it as a meeting with Skillhack. There are people in that group with design and business skills who want to learn to program (as well as programmers who want to learn businessy/design stuff). By getting people in the same room working on a project together, teaching each other stuff, everyone benefits. The next meeting is on the 26th of this month.

The format is very similar to what David suggested. A bunch of people get together and hack on stuff for a few hours. Sometimes people pitch in for lunch.

A handful of URUGers are involved in Skillhack already.

Just my $0.02.

Also, if you'd rather not do it with Skillhack, the people at the Miller incubator are really good to work with and would likely give you space to have a hackfest (depending on their calendar). Ping me if you want contact info.

peace out.

[David Richards]

Dude, that's a valuable idea.  +1, if we're going to get together and hack.  What say ye?

[Max]

great idea on the skill hack etc.... it's premature for me to go down
any path. I have yet to hear back from the "client" since letting her
know that there's some interest in the project etc so it may end up
dying on the vine due to their lack of follow through. we'll see. I
don't want to waste anyone else's time but it sounds like there's some
interest and resources available which is all i wanted to know at this
point.

I will definitely get back to you all on this.. thanks so much!

Max