Fwd: [Neighborly] Next Hackathon in January

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Ian Bicking

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Jan 8, 2010, 2:01:03 PM1/8/10

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I forgot to mention this here...
So in December there was a Sunlight Foundation National Day Of Hacking
(I don't think they used that name, but it'd be a good name), and a
few of us started working on something called "Neighborly", a tool for
neighbors to communicate with each other. Kind of like a discussion
forum based on distance. We didn't actually get that far (at least
past discussion) but we're going to have another hackathon TOMORROW.
The core product is in Django, so your Python skills will be apropos.
Full details below...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ian Bicking <ia...@colorstudy.com>
To: neigh...@forums.e-democracy.org

OK, some details for the next hackathon:
Date: Saturday, January 9th
Time (tentatively): 2pm until we lose steam. Does that sound good?
Location: my place, 3015 10th Ave S (map: http://bit.ly/3015-map),
Apt. 2 (left door)
Please RSVP (just email me) to give me an idea of how many people to
expect; but if you forget to RSVP don't let that stop you from coming.
Bringing drinks and snacks is appreciated, but don't feel obliged.

Before the hackathon:
Check out the repository: http://github.com/ianb/neighborly
Sign up for an account on github. We're full of trust, so everyone
gets push access to the main repository.
Try to get Postgres and PostGIS installed on your laptop (if you get
stuck someone can surely help you at the hackathon, but it's helpful
if you try it out ahead of time).
Read the README, some of the mail on this list, ask questions, etc.
If you can get the code running, that would be great; it doesn't *do*
much right now (the only thing it really does is have some models and
the standard Django admin forms).
In terms of platform, we've got a skeleton built on Django
(http://www.djangoproject.com/) and GeoDjango (http://geodjango.org/).
Reading up on those certainly can't hurt. There's interest in using
other platforms (e.g., Ruby), though we haven't talked in depth about
how that might work. The most obvious way would be things like a
scraper that monitors sites of local interest (e.g., the city website)
and finds items of local interest, and then adds them to the system
(as kind of generic "interesting local content").
Besides programming, these skills are useful:
  1. UI work; HTML, etc.
  2. Graphic design help is always awesome and usually missing.
  3. Helping build up functional documentation; what are we making,
how should it work? (for developer consumption)
  4. Site documentation (for user consumption)
You've probably noticed Steven has already been doing stuff for 3; if
we're all on the same page about what we're trying to build I think
we'll be much more efficient, so this is really helpful. Anyone with
knowledge of HTML can be immediately helpful by building HTML mockups,
wireframes, etc; I think it actually works really well to do this
frontend work before implementing the programming behind those forms,
so