We're going to have the first SchoolTool development sprint this summer at a small open source in education conference called the Northeast Linux Symposium at the University of New Hampshire in the US <http://nelinux.net> from July 16-19. The basic idea of a development sprint is to bring together the far-flung contributors of an open source project to have an intense period of face to face work.
Since SchoolTool is an unusual project, we're going to have a somewhat unusual sprint. In addition to giving our developers some time together (we'll be flying over Albertas from Vilnius, Stephan and I are driving up, and several members of the CanDo team will be in attendance), holding the sprint at this conference will also give us an opportunity to meet face to face with many potential users, since the conference is almost exclusively attended by open-source-using systems administrators, technology coordinators and consultants. It will also give these folks a chance to see the open source development process in action, which I think will be exciting. On the first day of the conference we'll give a hands-on introduction to SchoolTool. Attendees are encouraged to actually bring their server from school and install and configure the various pieces of software they'll learn about in various sessions. So we'll walk people through installing and configuring SchoolTool with the developers there to assist and get a better sense of the experience of people using the application for the first time. We'll also, I'm sure, get some feedback on features or customizations attendees might need to use SchoolTool at their school. Ideally, we'll be able to implement at least a few of these during the subsequent two days of the conference, which will be devoted to a more conventional development sprint. I imagine we'll also have some pressing problems to solve as our partner schools are deploying SchoolTool at this time. If you are interested in SchoolTool but you aren't a developer, you can come to the Symposium and attend other fine workshops the second and third day. If you would only want to come for the SchoolTool workshop, I'm not sure what the cost would be. Let me know and I can ask the organizers. If you are a developer and would like to participate in the sprint, let me know. We're still working out what the cost for room and board will be for people who will be attending our sprint but not other sessions. --Tom _______________________________________________ Schooltool mailing list [email protected] http://lists.schooltool.org/mailman/listinfo/schooltool
