Our friends at Amherst Planworld

[Ian Young]

Hey all,

Last weekend at a conference I met Seth Fitzsimmons, the maintainer of Amherst's Planworld system. Planworld is a system very similar to GrinnellPlans, evolved from a VAX and following a surprisingly familiar course to our own. Along with a private community like ours, they also run a public node at http://planworld.net/, which you can check out if you're so inclined. I've introduced myself on their mailing list (included below) and invited anyone who's interested to come join ours.

Seth and I both think that possibly merging the two projects could be very cool. However, I'm considering that more of a long-term goal. Nothing about the current rewrite will be changing.

Ian

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ian Young <ian.gr...@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 9:39 PM
Subject: Re: active development! (and an introduction)
To: plan...@googlegroups.com


Hi everyone! I'm pleased to be here. Seth and I had a good talk at the conference, and it was fun to compare the two systems and see which features had converged and which had diverged in the evolution of our respective systems. The spirit of the two projects seems to have remained remarkably similar, probably due to the VAX heritage. And it sounds like you all have the same strong sense of community at Planworld that we cherish about Grinnell Plans.

To expand on what Seth said: our system, much like yours, is creaky old PHP that's showing its age. I've been the primary active developer over the past few years, and have made some fitful efforts to introduce MVC and clean up some of the old junk, but in the end I got fed up with maintaining a system that was fighting against me. A few weeks ago we kicked off a rewrite of Grinnell Plans using Ruby on Rails. Right now we've got a couple active contributors, and a bunch more who have expressed interest who I'm trying to coax into contributing.

I think the idea of merging projects is fantastic - both communities could benefit from combining our small contributor bases, and having another community with a shared history could be very helpful in shaping the vision of what we want Plans to be in the next decade. The bad news for you all is that I'm enforcing a no-new-features rule on the Rails project until it has launched (simply in the interest of getting the project finished before enthusiasm wanes). Since Grinnell Plans has some not-inconsequential differences in functionality from Planworld, this probably means that a merge is more of a long-term goal. But by all means, let's get excited about the possibility.

If you'd like to contribute to a Rails project and get some great real-world experience, stop on by our github repo: https://github.com/annaswims/GrinnellPlans. We've got people willing to mentor, and I promise we're friendly. We also have a developer mailing list much like this one, feel free to join it if you'd like to keep tabs on where we're at: https://groups.google.com/group/grinnellplans-development.

Ian

On Sat, Apr 16, 2011 at 9:53 AM, Seth Fitzsimmons <se...@mojodna.net> wrote:

So, hi.

I was at a conference in San Francisco last weekend and I met one of the '08s working on the Rails port of Planworld.  Well, kinda.  It's not actually Planworld, but it's pretty darn similar.

Planworld people, meet [youngian], or, as he's known in the real world, Ian Young.  He's from *Grinnell*.  (The [username] thing is their PlanLove syntax, aka Snoop.)

Some of you may remember a discovery I made back in, oh, 2002 or 2003 or even 2004, where I ran across Grinnell Plans (now at http://grinnellplans.com/) and exchanged a few emails with them about our shared VAX heritage.  From their FAQ (http://grinnellplans.com/documents/faq.html):

In the days of old, Grinnell College had a Vax computer system. One of the standard commands available on this system was called 'finger'. This command gave various information about a user, including showing the person's .plan file. Each user had their own .plan file, which was originally meant for people at companies and elsewhere to post what their work plans were. The .plan file at Grinnell College (and many other places) gained a social aspect however. People started posting notes to their friends, writing stories, or writing whatever else they felt like writing. At Grinnell College, a small group of students called the 'VAXGods' wrote and maintained scripts to allow users to automatically keep track of which of their friends had updated their .plan files. 

During the summer of 2000, the Vax at Grinnell College was phased out of operation. There was a time period in which no sort of plan system existed at Grinnell College. During this time period however, older students felt a strong dismay over the loss of the popular plans system. Thoughts floated around about creating a new web-based version of plans, and so Rachel Heck ('01) was the first to take the initiative in creating a web-based plan system.

Sound familiar?

Anyway, they're in a very similar situation to us now what with an aging codebase, etc. and lots of users who are still active.  We were talking for a bit and came to the conclusion that shared effort might be a good thing (assuming people are interested).

The repo containing their ongoing work is here: https://github.com/annaswims/GrinnellPlans  AFAIK, there are 3 or 4 people working on it, but Ian can fill in with more details.

Discuss.

seth

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