So, you don’t have enough on your plate already? As an open source / Linux festival organizer, I would suspect that your lives are pretty normal for about 9 months of the year.  You work your job, go to school and do the normal thing.  But about 3 months (usually spread out over 6 months and an intense 2 weeks right before, during and after your fest) is spent planning, organizing and running an amazing festival.

Now there are some things that are running very smoothly, and others that could be improved.  One of those things that can always use improvement is a conference management system.  You know, that thing that would make life simpler, easier and better organized overall, but just takes a lot of time to write and maintain?

Well, no longer!  The Utah Open Source Foundation and Conference (UTOSC) and the Southern California Linux Exposition (SCaLE) have created two tools to help with this process.  The utos-conman and scalereg projects have been open sourced and are available for consumption.  This is exciting news!

If you are interested in registration, including kiosk setup, check-in, badge printing and online registration, scalereg has many features to help you along.  For management of sponsors, speakers, or with a call for papers approval processes, utos-conman is your tool.

But that’s only the beginning of the process!  We’re looking to improve these two tools into an integrated all-in-one solution. Because scalereg and utos-conman are both written in Django with Python, we’ll be updating and integrating these two services to provide an overall solution for any conference organizers.  What we
need is volunteers to help us create this solution.

With the idea of reusable apps within the Django Project, these two applications will likely be able to be used standalone.  If we define some good standards (which are probably already in place), we can help these two systems share login data, registration information and provide roles for particular users, etc.  There’s a lot to be done in both of these applications.

This email is intended to start out with the conference organizers of such community conferences as Ohio Linux Fest, Ontario Linux Fest, Open Source Bridge, Linuxfest NorthWest, New Mexico Linux Fest and SouthEast Linux Fest.  I’m sure there are many others out there, so I apologize if I missed your community conference.  Anyway, the plan is to get you all involved in this process, to help us plan and grow these two bits of software with what you already have, or to help
create something new that will help your conference.

I have been talking with several of the organizers around the country and know there is much common ground.  And I’m sure there are features some will want and others not, but that’s what is great about free and open source software.  Especially with the reusable app concept, we should be able to add all the pieces, letting each group pick and choose the tools they need.

There was a suggestion that before each conference/fest, we have a day long hackfest on a new feature for this project.  I think that’s a great idea.  In addition, I know that UTOS plans to hold hacknights (once or twice a month) from now until October to improve utos-conman, as well as integrate the scalereg code into a reusable app and port it to Django 1.0.

So let’s start this conversation and see where it leads as I’d like to see some really cool progress.  Something that can rival any proprietary offering available.

Thank you for your time and efforts putting on your events.  I look forward to meeting with all of you, my friends, again and again.

Cheers,

Clint

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 12:38 am and is filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.