As was provided for the guys at Steel Rubber at the users conference,
I''m happy to give rides for up to four people down to Ephraim for
these events. So, people coming into town, just need to say the word.
This is a great opportunity to:
1. Move the project along more quickly than normal
2. Vastly improve the marketing efforts
3. Further tighten up the our developer community
4. And continue to show our customers that they will be supported by
an open source community - even when they're not funding everything
As for timing, my only request is that we do it sometime after
February 26th.
Cheers,
Tim
--
Tim Ruppert
HotWax Media
http://www.hotwaxmedia.com
o:801.649.6594
f:801.649.6595
On Jan 5, 2007, at 5:02 AM, David E Jones wrote:
Hello All,
During the Users Conference this past November the idea of a
developers conference came up, and being something I had discussed
with others before this seemed to be a great idea and something I'd
be happy to host here at the same place where we had the user
conference in Nov 2006 (ie the old hotel where my home and office
are right now, in Ephraim, UT).
The general idea is to get together and basically just work on
stuff. We'd like to get as many of the committers and regular
contributors here as possible, and maybe even pool some funds to
help mitigate the expense for far away people like Jacopo, Jacques,
Hans, and perhaps various others.
We may have some presentations on general topics, but the main
point will be to pick a few objectives for the project and push
them forward. We will definitely want feedback on the projects we
want to attach, and I'm thinking we'll have one person champion
each objective, and then everyone can split into groups and rotate
around and just work on stuff. We'll have a couple of projectors
available, plenty of chairs and table space and facilities for
everyone's laptops, and then we'll get some snacks and a mountain
of bottled water and we should be good to go.
As we talked about this the hope is certainly to help move certain
part of the OFBiz project forward, but also to work on anything
that at least a couple of people need for clients and hopefully
have funding for to help them be able to attend and collaborate.
Ephraim is a small town and rather conservative, but we managed to
find pretty good diversion in the evenings, including "imbibing"
mountains of pasta, or getting in some beer and bowling at the
local alley (which surprisingly, even to me, was pretty decent).
For those staying longer in the area there are some national parks
within a few hours, and lots of mountain roads that are groomed and
marked for snowmobiling and back-country skiing and such (or other
things during the summer). We also have games and stuff in the
building, like ping pong, foosball, and air hockey types of things.
The 2 main things I think we need to discuss are:
1. when to do it
2. what objectives to pursue
For #1 we're thinking about doing this as a full week late February
or early March with 3 possibilities, including: Feb 19 - 23, Feb 26
- Mar 2, or Mar 5 - 9.
These are all about 2 months away and should hopefully give
everyone time to get organized and make arrangements.
Before getting into topics to cover, here are a few details about
arrangements:
1. this will be sponsored and organized by the new and improved
Hotwax Media, and the cost will be minimal and intended to just
cover expenses (including meeting room facilities, food/snacks/
drinks, and in some cases even lodging); the conference alone
(without lodging or meals included) will probably run around $150
per person and as mentioned lodging in the building can be added on
very affordably, and the meals dining in the area should be around
$20-30 per day depending on how crazy you want to get ;)
2. the location will be old Ephraim Hotel at 24 West Center,
Ephraim, UT 84627; we'll have meeting/working space for a maximum
of around 25 people and we might be able to arrange for another
adjacent room to handle a few more; there will be around 10 very
affordable (~$25-30 per night) lodging rooms available in the
building, and beyond that we have other rooms that aren't fixed up
yet but there are other lodging options in town including a pretty
nice mid-range hotel that costs around $80 per night
3. for travel: Ephraim is about a 2 hour drive from the Salt Lake
City airport (code: SLC); alternatively, it is about a 4.5 to 5
hour (340 miles) drive from Las Vegas, NV; for real flexibility
renting a car is a good idea, but we plan to arrange for rides with
various local people or perhaps even a rented van or something for
a ride share; we will need feedback on what people need or want in
this area too
So, for anyone interested in coming, please contact me (directly,
off the list) with your preferences on the following:
1. when to have the conference: Feb 19 - 23, Feb 26 - Mar 2, or Mar
5 - 9
2. your travel and accommodation preferences: need a ride from the
SLC airport? prefer to stay at the building or in a nearby hotel?
3. would you be interested and able to contribute to help core
people from farther away make it to the conference? if so how much?
4. would you be interested in intermediate level training before
the conference (we are considering this, but haven't decided yet),
or perhaps even more mentoring oriented sessions during the
conference?
5. which objectives most interest you (select from below, and
include your own too):
a. testing infrastructure (finishing this up)
b. kick-start a body of automated tests based on (a)
c. project management build out so many of us as services companies
can use it to run our businesses, and so that once it matures we
can run/manage OFBiz on it too (this would be an alternative to
things like Jira, XPlanner, gForge, etc); this could include a
number of sub-objectives, even things like ical, etc features to
integrate with desktop calendar and contact and such software;
should also include reports, handy UIs for common tasks, short
process docs for how we recommend the various tools be used
together, etc
d. content solutions: this could/would include stuff built on the
current OFBiz content management data model and services, and/or
the really cool Webslinger stuff from Brainfood (beyond whatever
happens before the conference!)
e. begin development on the human resources application
f. refactor and clean up really old and messy code, like: the
storeOrder service, the order manager checkout process, etc.
g. visually appealing face lift for ecommerce, and based on that
the back end apps too; this should include CSS oriented refactoring
to be more Zen Garden like and easier to maintain and customize
h. usability enhancements for certainly frequently used screens
(like party search, order search, etc) based on AJAX and DHTML
i. generic setup wizard, and perhaps one or two extension wizard
examples for specific industries; this would go along with setup
data files specific to these as well
j. reporting tool refinements (probably form widget based) and a
wider variety of OOTB reports, including some examples of how to do
funky and cool print and web reports with these tools
k. working through bugs to stabilize a release branch (which should
be started a few weeks before the conference)
l. review, organize, and expand the documentation (mostly now on
docs.ofbiz.org, with most stuff moving there)
m. ...
Okay, there is a LOT we could cover and depending on how many
people show up we'll want a list of probably 5-10 objectives to
pursue, making sure we get at least a few things of interest to
everyone.
==========================
In general this is a chance for all of us to learn tons of stuff
and collaborate in a way that is sometimes difficult remotely. The
main goal is to take care of things that have been moving slow for
a long time, or to jump start things that would be great but just
haven't been able to get off the ground yet.
I should also note that we would like to start doing this more
regularly, perhaps even quarterly if there is enough interest. We
can keep costs fairly low by doing it here in Ephraim or in other
places like this, and by doing it regularly we can build the
community and move forward long term objectives in a way that has
been very difficult so far.
I look forward to seeing as many of us there (here!) as possible!
-David
