Etherpad FAD

This is the main page for the Etherpad Fedora Activity Day to be held Oct 8-9th at Olin College of Engineering. We are going to improve Etherpad, the wonderful open source collaboration tool, package it for Fedora, and get one running at Olin and one on Fedora Infrastructure. Excited by any of the technologies we'll be using or a new contributor to open source, we hope you'll join us.

Check our current status on Twitter: http://twitter.com/olinetherpadfad

Beautiful Olin College in Needham, MA

When and Where

Location

Olin College, 1000 Olin Way, Needham MA, 02492, USA

[map]

Crescent Room (CC209 and CC211 inside Olin Campus Center)

Olin College Campus Center

Time: Friday Oct 8th, 5pm - Oct 9th

Note: all times are US Eastern. GMT -5 hours.

Background (what is Etherpad?)

Background: EtherPad (video demo) was a high-performance web-based collaborative document editor, launched in 2008 from etherpad.com. It was acquired by Google during the development of Google Wave, and the service's code base was open-sourced. Several websites now run an EtherPad service and there is interest in making private installs (such as one for the Fedora Project) easier to create.

Buuut the EtherPad code-base isn't exactly in a packageable state, as demonstrated by SDZ, here. We would like to package EtherPad correctly for Fedora. Where possible, we intend to use good build system practices and clean up libraries used.

Finally, once complete, we'd like to use the new packages to setup an EtherPad instance for the Fedora Community.

I'm new to FADs / open source / hackathons what can I expect?

Expect to learn a lot. The FAD is mainly about a volunteer group working to make a dent in an awesome piece of software. Not an über-coder, we'll find ways for you to help, and make sure you learn something.

Not interested in working a whole weekend on Etherpad? Stop by 5pm Saturday for a presentation by Jeff Mitchell on managing the KDE community (agenda)! How do you manage a passionate, distributed group of international volunteers? We'll find out. After, we'd love to talk about open source, our communities, and technology in general.

I'm far away / can't physically attend, how can I help?

We'll be hanging out on IRC! I'll make sure there is someone dedicated to IRC / community contact.

Don't know what IRC is yet? It's the realtime chat system that many open source communities use. (Mel Chua) would be happy to teach you; just drop me a line at mchua {at} fedoraproject {dot} org.

Channel: #etherpad on Freenode (exclusively) Twitter Updates: http://twitter.com/olinetherpadfad

Send me a bit about yourself and will pull in: colin {at} zonion {dot} org If you're helping remotely, it would be great if you bopped in during Pre-FAD planning, 5pm Oct 2nd (agenda).

Communication Channels

Updates, news, PSA -- Twitter: https://twitter.com/olinetherpadfad

During FAD Backchannel -- IRC: #etherpad on Freenode

Agenda

Pre-FAD (very optional)

• Saturday, October 2nd
  • 3pm - Assess skill sets, forge plans and detailed goals, run numbers for buying food, etc.

computercolin: Planning to connect with Joe Cornelli and some EP contributors from Europe here.

FAD

• Friday, October 8th
  • 5pm - Kickoff (introductions, something fun, layout of plan)
  • 6pm - Hacking
  • 8pm - Educational Break: Intro to OSS development for Olin Students
• Saturday, October 9th
  • 11:00am - Individual reports and progress check
  • 11:30am - Hacking
  • 1:30pm - Indian lunch buffet at Masala Art
  • 2:30pm - Hacking
  • 5:00pm - Talk: Jeff Mitchell of KDE on Building and Maintaining Communities
  • 7:00pm - Interactive Stir-fry Dinner
• Sunday, October 10th
  • Breakfast by Colin for the hardcore
  • Kickout

Purpose

1. Our purpose is to...
   • Repackage EtherPad in a consistent, portable way, more best-practice form
   • Create compliant, Fedora packages for EtherPad
   • Setup EtherPad instance on Fedora Infrastructure
   • Teach non-Propeller-heads about OSS development and the technologies used
2. In addition, we will attempt to complete the following secondary goals as time allows:
   • Build better(/more complete) test system for EtherPad
   • Create a EP web-config interface -- easier to deploy EP
   • Document EP

Plan

computercolin: Think we could do a most-of-night (all-night?) hack session one of the nights. Both, probably too much.

Skills Sought

• Javascript/scala/java decipherment
• Build system skills (particularly Ant and Scala/JS friendly systems)
  • expertise in jetty, Comet, AppJet or Rhino would be helpful
  • also some mysql or apache derby
• infrastructure deployment
• software project management
• code (re)architecture
• developer documentation
• Malleable mind to fill (don't know anything here? come learn something, hear war stories, join open source!)

People

Physically Present

• Jeff Mitchell (Boston, MA) - Asked to give talk, community management, coding, sysadmin - coming
• Tom Calloway (Littleton?, MA) - packaging, polymath coding skills, legal - coming
• Jon Stanley (New York, NY) - sysadmin, polymath coding skills - coming
• DJ Gallagher (Boston, MA) - Java Propeller-head - dev, documentation 'Will be there
• Matt Crawford (Wellesley, MA) - polymath computer skills - Interested in coming
• Colin Zwiebel (Needham, MA) - Organizer (it appears) - developer, Oliner, Will be there
  • Find great OSS mavericks
  • Snag some cool space at Olin
  • Get some awesome Oliners (not hard)
  • Make sure everyone learns something and has fun
• Andy Pethan (Needham, MA) - Attendee/hacker/facilitator - developer, Etherpad fanboy Will be there
• Sebastian Dziallas ( Needham, MA) - Fedora Packager - developer, packager Will make it
• Paul Booth (Olin) - Coding, testing, jokes - Be there
• Jason Curtis (Olin) - Java - Interested
• Jeff Atkinson (Olin) - Java - coming
• Danny Bathgate (Olin) - polymath programming skills - interested
• Kevin Mehall (Olin) - coding, lots of linux admin - Very interested

Remote

• Mel Chua (Raleigh, NC) - QA implementation - Can probably come if schedule is free--Errt, she's in South Africa doing a POSSE
  • Ticket tracker setup (move this to fedorahosted.org?)
  • Collect all existing bugs/enhancement requests and get them written and triaged properly
  • Test case/results system implementation
  • Write and execute first round of test cases, starting with a smoke test, then moving to focus on scaleability, cross-platform/browser testing
  • QA infrastructure experimentation (probably looking at Mozilla's tools for starters)
• Joe Cornelli - (Milton Keynes, UK?) - linux admin skills, further evaluation needed - Interested in remoting
• John McClear - (UK) - PrimaryPad, admin, (more...) - Very interested in remoting, has week off!
• Brian Herman - (Chicago, IL) - polymath programming - Interested in remoting
• Henrik Heigl (Germany) - Fedora Marketing - Interested in remote participation, also can dialIn via Fedoratalk (e.g. Conference Call)

Logistics

Snacks/Beverages:

• Andy / Oliner w/ car will pickup week of FAD. Will consist mainly of Soda.

Lunch:

• Masala Art outing
  • Attendees will carpool / ride bikes 1 mile into Needham

Masala Art on Yelp

Dinner:

• Friday (8th) - Sweet Tomatoes Pizza
• Saturday (9th) - Communal, interactive, stir-fry dinner
  • Colin and helpers will grab rice cookers, setup spicing station

Infastructure / Communication

1. Projector i=n room / borrow from Olin IT
2. Borrow video camera for streaming video / screencast

Budget

Food

• Pre-FAD
  • $0
• FAD
  • Food:
    • Friday, Sweet Tomatoes Pizza - $15 / reg attendee ~$120
    • Saturday, Masala Art Buffet (the discussion meal) - $14 / reg attendee ~$250
    • Saturday, Communal Chinese Dinner - $150 total
  • Drinks / Snacks
    • $20 /night =$40

Food total: $560

Travel

Contributor	Type	Dept	Arrv	Dept	Arrv	Cost	Final Cost
Jon Stanley	Amtrak	Oct 8 ~6pm - NYC (Penn station)	Oct 8 - Route 128 Station (RTE)	Oct 10 ~9am - Olin	Oct 10 - NYC (Penn station)	$180 USD	$113 USD + (undermined gas and wear for train <-> Olin transport)

Lodging

Contributor	Location	Check-in	Check-out	Cost	Final Cost
Tom Calloway	BECC (~at olin)	Oct 8	Oct 10	$350 USD	0 (Admissions room)
Jon Stanley	BECC (~at olin)	Oct 8	Oct 10	$350 USD	0 (Admissions room)

Total

$1440 USD

Logs

• 2010-09-06 planning meeting (budget review before submission)