Hackfest for August 4th Meeting?

[Dave]

Hey Chicago Ruby folks, as someone suggested at the last Chirb
meeting, us organizers are considering having our August 4th Meeting
be a hackfest of sorts. That said, none of us have ever been to
anything that might formally be called a "hackfest", so we thought
we'd throw it out to the community and see if any of you guys had any
good ideas for how we might go about making one happen.

My understanding of hackfest: bunch of developers getting together to
hack on projects of their choosing in a group(s).

Obviously, we don't want to impose too much structure on this type of
thing, but perhaps we should pick a few open source projects (plugins,
gems, that selenium script Josh was talking about, etc.) to choose
from? Is there anything to the idea of working in pairs, and rotating
every 15 minutes or so? Or would it be better to just play it by ear
and see what happens? Or maybe there's a usual structure to hackfests
that we're unaware of.

In any event, we want to hear what you guys think would make a great
coding-focused meeting.

Thanks!

[Jake Scruggs]

Hackfest is cool -- I can volunteer metric_fu for hacking on.  There's always more to do.

-Jake