RFC: Act Hackathon in Oslo in 2015

[Stefan Hornburg (Racke)]

On 06/18/2014 02:27 PM, Philippe Bruhat (BooK) wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2014 at 06:52:02PM +0200, Stefan Hornburg (Racke) wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't have any dates or details to offer yet, but if the list is
>>> interested in helping making this happen, I'd like to aim for having
>>> the hackathon in April or May (having said that, I ask that I and
>>> Oslo.pm get to decide the dates for the hackathon, so that we can make
>>> the most out of our resources.)
> 
> I think April/May clashes with the Perl QA Hackathon, which I'd love to
> attend. As you can guess, I'd also love to attend a Act hackathon.
> 
>>> Oh, and on a personal note; I think there's a real need to Make Stuff Happen with Act, but I might be wrong or at the very least delusional that we can make something happen. 
> 
> I agree that Act needs some love.
> 
>>> If you can commit to help in a meaningful way, please reply (publicly) to this message with your formal non-revocable commitment announcement! ;)
> 
>> Great idea! Act needs definitely more love. From my point of view, I would like to add a full-fledged API to it in order allow to run your
>> own Act app based on the framework of your choice like Dancer2!
> 
> API is definitely the way to go. This is what I had in mind for Act2.
> (and by "in mind" I really mean that nothing ever happended outside of
> my head...)
> 
> Some of my main goals for Act2:
> - keep what made Act successful (multi-conference, multi-language, sharing
>   the data between conferences, integrated payment system, template-driven)
> - a main site for everything not tied to a conference (personal
>   preferences, etc)
> - for organizers, everything should be doable from a web interface,
>   including setting up a new conference (once you've been given sufficient
>   rights)
> - not Perl-centric
> - an API, which would enable CLI tools, setting up your own web interface
>   instead of the one provided by Act, etc.
> - CLI tools should be available at all levels, even attendees or anonymous
>   users
> - groups of conferences / plugins (as in "these properties should only
>   show up for Perl conferences", "my conference does not need a wiki")
> - actually, conference "profiles" (sets of plugins), and "generic conferences"
>   (like, define a "French Perl Workshop" profile, and give a number of people
>   some right on it, so that they can independently create the next one,
>   give further rights on that, etc)
> - better support for user-preferences (date formats, timezones, languages)
> - support for smaller events (Perl mongers meetings, hackatons)
> - better support for "historical data" (updating your generic user profile
>   or your profile for ye2014 should probably not update your profile for
>   ye2003. Or maybe in some case it should. The user decides.)
> 
> Another important point for me is being able to support all existing
> conferences, but I think that can be kept for later stages (including
> a data-munging phase where we convert old conferences to the new scheme
> (which is what I did with ye2003)).
> 
> There's one thing I'd love to have: a "decentralized" database, which
> would enable:
> - having several independent "authorities" that can run their DB locally
>   (i.e. close to the main web server), so that the Japanese Perl community
>   doesn't need to run its huge conferences on a European server
> - working in a disconnected way (eg the admission desk at a conference)
> 
> Note that a decentralized database is certainly a complex thing to setup
> (I think masak might have some good ideas on the topic) and that not
> everything has to be shared betweeen different instances (e.g. payment data).
> 
> My opinion is that an effort on Act2 should first focus on the data and
> on an API. What is the important stuff about people and events? I think
> the idea of a conference toolkit can be generalized to work with any
> "gathering of people", possibly down to work-meeting-sized stuff.(*)
> 
> Working on an API makes it easier to focus on the data (which is the value
> of Act) and to leave working on other things for later (the web framework,
> the conference management tools, etc). I think Act2 should come up with a
> web application (with better support for conference-specific templates),
> but should not be tied to it (so that others can do something else with
> it, like a smartphone app).
> 
> Act is a rewrite of the ad-hoc tool we made for ye2003. It's probably time
> for another rewrite.
> 
> (*) and there maybe lies the idea for a startup...
> 

Apparently all these big plans tend to fall apart. What about adding
a decent API to current ACT ?

Regards
       Racke


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