Re: Event management software open source

[Frederic Muller <fred beijinglug org>]

Hi!

The reason for best tool for the job  discussion is because the web site 
experience from an organizer perspective, and a 'visitor' perspective 
has been very average so far. I don't understand why we need a developer 
to "do something" every time something has to be done on the website. 
There are many tools which don't require an engineer to spend time and 
this is what we should be using.

I have been silent about this so far as it was not under my 
responsibility at all but for some reasons I am getting more in the 
front lines lately and gets direct complaints about this.

Now if you're telling me we have something that does exactly what we 
need and in 2010 we will not need to write code to be ready, I'm fine 
with it. Else I think we should carefully evaluate and learn from 2008 
and 2009. It has been obvious (and unfortunately you didn't attend the 
conference) that the GNOME.Asia Summit board/committee (whatever we call 
ourselves) needs to be more involved in a lot of things to make the 
conference a smooth event and one of those things is about scheduling, 
speakers presenting order, and website functionalities and availability.

By the way could we configure this mailing list to "reply-to mailing 
list address" by default instead of "reply to sender" as it is now? 
There has been way too many discussions off the list giving every member 
of this group only a partial view of what was happening.

Can we get the new website system on 2010.gnome.asia and start getting 
ready to use it?

I hope you understand my perspective. Emails sometimes makes it 
difficult to express ideas and how the sender feels about those. As we 
have never met please trust that I just want something easy for 
everyone, and am willing to put in time so 2010 organizer has the 
smoothest experience possible with the website.

Thanks a lot for your continuous support.

Fred

Will LaShell wrote:
> Hi Fred,
>
> I am. 
>
> There is currently ongoing discussion of the updates to the summit
> website  codebase used in 2008.  It was mostly updated for this year but
> was not used. 
>
> Behdad was following our conference website work during 2008, but has
> since sort of fell off the map conversation wise. I should send him a
> message or two to restart that conversation.
>
> I personally don't think any current prebuilt free or low cost solution
> is the best for our needs.  Judging by the completely terrible way the
> website operated this year we can rule out wordpress as well.
>
> There is no reason why we cannot continue the codebase we started with 2
> years ago and improve it. We learned many of the things that we need to
> handle cleanly and the TODO list has been sitting for awhile now.
>
> One of the original design goals for the 2008 website was to make it
> flexible enough that it did not need to be rebuilt each year. The
> templates are re-useable, the database would simply be copied and off
> and running the site goes.
>
> There is no reason for a "best tool for the job" discussion.  It was had
> in 2008. There was no discussion on it for 2009 either. I have looked at
> the fsoss-con software and the core is pretty similar to what was
> already done.
>
> If people are interested in helping with this effort, feel free to speak
> up. 
>
> Will
>
>
> On Sat, 2009-12-12 at 11:05 +0800, Frederic Muller wrote:
>   
> > Following up on this front there is a thread started for Guadec, also
> > looking at hosting their own open source project right here:
> > http://mces.blogspot.com/2009/12/lazyweb-conference-organizingscheduling.html
> >
> > One of the project seems to be using Django, so maybe a good fit for
> > our current infrastructure?
> >
> > Who's our conference website lead by the way?
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > Fred
> >
> > Frederic Muller wrote: 
> >     
> > > Hi!
> > >
> > > I guess everyone is recovering from the great event we had last
> > > weekend. Following up on the team meeting we had Sunday morning I
> > > took a quick look at software covering the subject line. It seems
> > > OCS http://pkp.sfu.ca/?q=ocs could do the job for next year. For the
> > > website feature list include:
> > >       * create a conference Web site
> > >       * compose and send a call for papers
> > >       * electronically accept paper and abstract submissions
> > >       * allow paper submitters to edit their work
> > >       * post conference proceedings and papers in a searchable
> > >         format
> > >       * post, if you wish, the original data sets
> > >       * register participants
> > >       * integrate post-conference online discussions
> > >       * Multiple languages
> > >       * localization & translation tools
> > >       * manage conferences that occur more than once (e.g. yearly)
> > > That would avoid to go into a "best tool discussion" every year and
> > > let us focus on organization instead of infrastructure development
> > > and maintenance.
> > >
> > > Since that was once of the action item, well here it is. It would be
> > > nice to be able to keep the live feed we had in 2008 though.... :)
> > >
> > > Fred
> > >
> > > ____________________________________________________________________
> > >
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> > > asia-summit-list gnome org
> > > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/asia-summit-list
> > >   
> > >       
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> >     
>
>
>
>