Flock 2016 Software Problems

These notes come from the Flock 2015 conference in Rochester, NY USA.

Fixing the Flock Software System

We aren't talking about Flock itself, but the software / website for it. We're not talking about FUDcon sites but things that help it too are good. Focus is on Flock website.

Scope:

• Registration
• Submission
• Voting?
• Schedule (rooms, times, talks)
• Information (pre-, during, post)
• Remotee attendance

NOTE: It would be helpful if whatever solution(s) we come up with enabled both FUDCon + Flock events

Problems:

• Registration
  • Need to require email address
  • Would be nice to collect flight/visa info instead of doing it through google doc--privacy concerns (good for fudcons in general too)
    • and track reimbursements
    • so, we need a way to customize user info that only the user + admins can see
  • reg disconnected from voting system
  • Some attendees do not want the fact that they are away from home to be publicly listed on the 'net
  • Need region of the registration (EMEA, NA, APAC, LATAM)
  • Need to confirm speaker attendance
  • Need to confirm registrant / attendee attendance
  • Registrant emails bouncing
  • Specific volunteer opportunities in registration form
  • Automation for querying funded travelers to provide links to the volunteer content (blogs, photos, etc) they agreed to do in order to get funding and get them sent to organizers, automate notification of who didn't do it to organizers
  • Is the person going to come if their talk was turned down? or are they not going to go then?

• Submission
  • Submission acceptance is manual
  • ALL notifications are really manual! :-(
  • Did we mention there was a lot of manual stuff involved? (automate all the things)
  • Ability for submitter to tag their talk into a category
  • Allow co-speakers and communicate with all speakers of a talk

• Voting
  • Used the Fedora voting system elections app / range voting with a restricted range
  • Had to look up talk synopsis elsewhere while voting in another window.... for 150 submissions its hard
  • It seemed like a huge number of talks had around 50 votes. When I saw that, I wondered if there was some issue in the voting system. (Or if many people were simply voting for every talk they found remotely interesting, rather than those they would actually attend.)
  • cluster related talks in the voting list so you can more easily compare them when voting
  • Note that many talks cross multiple categories. My "Remote Desktop & Fedora" is best categorized under Desktop (and thats how it was categorized), but some people would object to the categorization.
  • Elections app doesn't scale

• Schedule
  • happy with sched.org, it's cheap (but we should doc our process so we don't get TZ issues and similar)
  • Only admins could update any talk info -- might be a permission issue (ability to edit some extra information like URL or materials or co-speakers)
  • link to video in schedule later

• Information
  • Takes way too long to make simple change in content (locating where to do it, then waiting for admin page to load)

• Resources
  • Luke has to jump in each year to fix it
  • Everyone having problems with WordPress on OpenShift

• Website
  • Wordpress site backend/admin panel horrifically slow (we don't know why)
  • Wordpress backend/admin panel hard to navigate
  • Difficult to theme, so we don't update it
  • Archives of older flock info (eg videos, etc)
  • A way to pull curated photos or tweets into a semi-live feed
  • A way to tie volunteer content like photos, etc. to a badge

• Other:
  • Need proper HTTPS certificates
  • Bid voting
  • Ability to upload slides?
  • Ability to later add a URL to video, e.g. Fedora YouTube channel
  • Transcriptions of talks -- need a place to post them

Ground Rules:

• Yes, can put in a new application
• Do not have to require that it runs on Fedora infrastructure (requires too much packaging resources to do so not ideal)
• Something to run on openshift would be fantastic, we have access to that, we can scale access, can host a wide variety of frameworks/sw types
• Turn key / commercial solutions can be considered but we really want something open source and we know open source ones exist so we'd really prefer that
  • If it's not on a framework or language where we have skills, then it needs to be more turnkey

Potential solutions:

Zookeepr - http://zookeepr.org -- Ryan

• Developed/used by LCA
• Appears to be python
• review / voting system
• could talk to Donna Benjamin about it? (LCA organizer)

OpenConferenceWare

http://openconferenceware.org/

• Fully FOSS (Rails engine, ruby >= 1.9.3) (can't customize it too much, higher bar)
• Used for Open Source Bridge

SCaLE Reg

https://github.com/socallinuxexpo/scalereg

• Django app
• Poor/nonexistent documentation (Note: SCALE team would be happy to help improve any areas you see as problematic docs wise.)
• Supports registration, badge printing, and call for papers workflows. Is not a conference management suite.
• Used by SCALE, DevOpsDays Silicon Valley and TXLF

Open Source Event Manager (OSEM)

https://github.com/openSUSE/osem -- Mo

• Ruby app (so we can't customize it too much, higher bar)
• Used by openSUSE, GNOME, ownCloud; actively developed
• openid support

Wordpress + Plugins -- Paul

• https://wordpress.org/plugins/evenium/
  • Disappointing -- this is mainly a front end for Evenium.net SaaS (non-free) :-(
• https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/conference
  • https://wordpress.org/plugins/cr3ativ-conference/
    • Only a rudimentary framework for a few content types (categories, sessions, speakers)
    • No display functionality, reporting, registration, or venue definition -- would require a LOT of PHP coding
  • http://eventespresso.com/
    • For a single-event model; no multiple room support, no calendar or event check-in with free version
    • Oriented around pay ticketing/registration functions

Frab

http://frab.github.io/frab/ -- Jon

• ruby implementation of PentaBarf
• used for frosscon

VCC

• used for LinuxTag, but has a lot of things Flock wouldn't need
• https://vcc.linuxtag.org/

ConfLab

https://github.com/rh-lab-q/conflab

• no registration at DevConf? is that a function?
• may not be ready for prime time

sched.org + eventbrite + glue (custom code - foss) (moved down bc not foss)

Drupal COD (Conference Organizing Distribution)

http://usecod.com/ (moved down bc drupal is painful)

• Code at https://www.drupal.org/project/cod
• Used by LFNW, Drupal groups, other
• Paul has previous experience, was difficult to set up (drupal 6 COD not 7)

OpenConf

http://www.openconf.com/editions/ (moved down bc academic)

• Open core?
• More aimed at paper-driven conferences (academic)

Open Conference Systems

http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/ (moved down bc academic)

• Fully FOSS (LAM/PHP)
• Aimed at paper-driven conferences (academic)

PentaBarf

http://pentabarf.org/Pentabarf (moved down bc people are migrating away from)

• written in Perl so many events have dropped it
• python implementation called frab

Bedrock - Mozilla engine, Foss, https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/

• Installing locally: http://bedrock.readthedocs.org/en/latest/install.html
• https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contribute/events/
• https://reps.mozilla.org/events/#/period/future/
• the base heart of the listing is: Opennews - https://source.opennews.org/en-US/articles/tags/events/
• Also perhaps you find it useful: http://schema.org/ - Schema.org is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.

Hackdash - Web platform that brings people and ideas together and allows anyone to know the state of each project.

• When working on collaborative projects, it s always hard to * know what the other team members are doing. Later on, it becomes hard to remember who worked on what, where the data were used and where the prototype was.
• Website: https://ijnet.org/en/blog/hackdash-free-platform-organizing-collaborative-projects
• Visualization extra - D3.js: http://datadrivenjournalism.net/resources/data_driven_documents_defined

regcfp

https://git.gnome.org/browse/guadec-web-regcfp/

• The short install guide: git clone, cd, "npm install", ./bin/www
• puiterwijk knowledgable about

fudcon app - In house beveloped for the Fudcon Latam event using python by @echevemaster - http://fudconlatam.org/

• It is python
• MIT License
• Latam community can help to improve the app.
• Used for Fudcon Managua and Fudcon Córdoba

Next Steps

• communicate via flock-planning list
• set up ethercalc for evaluation
• set up test systems to play with

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