April 13th Community Calendar Hackathon

[Aaron Frerichs]

In case anyone is interested, Fusionfarm is sponsoring a hackathon this coming Saturday (April 13th).

We'll be gathering at The Gazette / KCRG offices on the 2nd floor or the Old Capital Mall in Iowa City starting around 9am Saturday morning and go into the afternoon.

The main theme of the Hackathon is to build something using the new Hoopla API that we'll be debuting. It's a JSON API with both GET and POST endpoints that allows read and write access to the Hoopla calendar of events. Right now the API is mostly undocumented, but the developers who have worked on the API will be present to help.

The plan is to build a few things utilizing the API, and open source them all so that others can build upon them.

1. An embeddable calendar - a calendar of events can be placed on any site. The results will be filterable at least by category and partner.

2. An embeddable event submission form

3. An import tool which can be used to pull events into Hoopla from Meetup.com. We'll likely start with Meetup.com to start, and potentially attempt Facebook Events as well.

We'll likely create some plugin wrappers for the embeddable pieces for Wordpress to make it easy on those who might want to use the calendar, but the calendar itself is written in Rails, so we'll probably want to create a rubygem to make it easy to use on Rails sites as well.

Breakfast and lunch will be provided, but feel free to drop in anytime throughout the day. The Gazette / KCRG offices are on the north end of the 2nd floor of the Old Capital Mall, near the corner of Washington and Clinton.