Introduction
There will be a pub meet and hackfest in Oxford during the weekend of 8th-10th December 2006 for participants in both the OpenGuides and OpenStreetMap projects. The timetable for the weekend has been finalized as follows:
Timetable (a.k.a. the bit you actually need to know)
Friday 8th December: Social
- 6pm onwards
- Far From the Madding Crowd
- Food served until 9pm
- Non-smoking area reserved (find us there; turn left on entering the pub)
- OSM map!
Saturday 9th December: Hackfest
- 10am-5pm
- Dom's house (Email Dom for location information)
- Pizza delivery lunch?
Saturday 9th December: BBC Backstage
- 6:30pm - 1am
- BBC Backstage Bash
- You need to already be signed up to the guest list
- Some of us will be catching the http://oxford.openguides.org/wiki/?Oxford_Tube to and from Oxford/the hack fest
Sunday 10th December: OpenStreetMap event
10.30am-3pmgone mapping... likely to end up in the pub by 3-4pm. Ring Dom (number below).Meet at Coffee Republic- Meet OpenGuides/OpenStreetMap? people, see demos of OSM maps and software, and go out to perfect our maps of Oxford
- There is a chance we will need to leave early; if we're not there, please ring Dominic (number below).
- If you would like to come and map, the earlier the better!
- http://upcoming.org/event/131996
- OSM map!
Contact
The main point of contact for the weekend is Dominic Hargreaves <dom@earth.li> on 07976 569915.
Attendees
Please add your name to this list or email your interest to Dominic. Email addresses are helpful, but if you dislike putting your address on a public web page, you don't have to. Sorry, for spam avoidance reasons you need an account to do this - see [AboutThisTracInstall].
| Name | Email address | Pub on Friday? | Hackfest on Saturday? | backstage.bbc | Mapping on Sunday | Accommodation required? | Accommodation arranged |
| Dominic Hargreaves | dom@earth.li | yes | yes | yes | yes | n/a | n/a |
| Nick Burch | openguides@gagravarr.org | yes | yes | yes | yes | n/a | n/a |
| EarleMartin | see home page | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | |
| Ivor Williams | ivorw-openguides@xemaps.com | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | |
| Robert (Jamie) Munro | rjmunro@arjam.net | yes | probably | yes | no | n/a | |
| Tom Heath | yes | yes | yes | yes | |||
| Mark Gaved | maybe | maybe | maybe | yes | |||
| David Sheldon | yes | probably | no | maybe | No | ||
| Rich | maybe | maybe | |||||
| Inigo Surguy | maybe | no | no | no | no | ||
| Artem Pavlenko | likely | possibly | no | probably | no | n/a | |
| Leif Isaksen | yes | maybe | no | n/a |
Plans
The Friday evening should be a mixture of socialising and discussing some of the more general aspects of OpenGuides (and OpenStreetMap/free data in general).
Some general areas for discussion:
- Development in OpenGuides: we have lots of open tickets, what are the priorities and how can we ensure that they are taken care of?
- Scaling: currently we have one guide per city or region; do we need to rethink this to be able to provide a global view of the world?
- In conjunction with the above: can we present a single portal for OpenGuides traffic?
- Integration with other geo systems: Can we mashup OpenGuides and OSM data sets in a way that people want, rather than lots of duplication of effort?
- Technological improvements: FastCGI, mod_perl, OpenLayers?+OSM, some Class::DBI/MVC framework needed?
- Installation/deployment improvements
- Default styles: a nice default look and feel is long overdue. Chasing Torchbox or doing it "ourselves".
- Spam filtering and authentication frameworks
- Anything else that people think of, or that stems from our bug list.
Saturday daytime should largely be a hands on hacking session where we can start improving OpenGuides again based on the discussions the previous night. I would expect to start around 10am and work until 5pm with a break for lunch.
Hackspace won't be available past then, as I am going to the backstage bash with at least some other OpenGuides people. This is a bit inconvenient but Oxford is close enough to London that I hope people can manage both.
What happens on Sunday depends on when people turn up really. I would expect more OpenStreetMap people, and it would probably be worth doing some public promotion of this event (tie-ins with OpenGuides/OSM - not much public promotion of OpenGuides has happened yet. Can we base ourselves somewhere central, prominent and warm to have a base and send people out mapping? Do we need to get a venue for this where members of the public can wander in? http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Oxford has info on mapping targets. Also go through and record geo coordinates for Oxford OpenGuides nodes?
