Comas as the Conference Management System for Debconf
Hi world,
I am writing this mail to both the Debconf5 and Comas mailing
lists. Please, in order to avoid me cross-posting this all over: Any
Debconf5 people who are interested in following and helping with
Comas, please join our mailing list [1]. We need people with Perl
skills... The Comas code is not the best code I have seen, but we have
taken care for it to be the best code we have written :) It is well
documented (although sometimes not very well commented), and should
not be very hard to follow. If you want to check out Comas from the
CVS, please do so [2], and tell me if you want commit access.
I just had a talk with Andreas Schuldei, Debconf organizer and now
part of this list. We were talking about what does Debconf need from
Comas, what do we already have, what can we implement, and what to
do. Comas guys, please take a look at [3] in order to get us started.
We have three kinds of requests: Those that Comas already does (or
that we need very little modification), those that are not currently
supported by Comas, and those that IMHO do not belong in Comas, but
can use the information supplied by Comas to be implemented.
What is already covered by Comas?
- talks/bofs <-> auditoriums <-> interested participants
- trip booking (a trip can be seen as a very special kind of proposal)
- registration (mostly everything, see below)
participation
- name tag printing
- finding potential for parallelizing talks/bofs
What could be covered by Comas?
- hotel room booking/sharing
- food booking (I had a bizarre idea which needs elaborating... But
food can also be abstracted to a conference. At any day, we can have
'meat' with a maximum of 100 attendees, 'vegetarian' with 30, and so
on... What do you think? Isn't it too baroque?)
- create hotel room lists, arrival and departure lists (would be
trivial)
- registration (plus: room mates, interest in books, arrival,
departure, flight numbers and KSP. Should be quite easy)
- better handling of parallel tracks - Andreas wants the attendees to
be able to choose on which talks they are more interested and reduce
the amount of people frustrated by two interesting talks at once. I
think this can be decently covered by tracks (our autoscheduler
takes tracks into account), but it would be nice to add such an
algorithm.
What I think we should not incorporate?
- notification system (Comas does not run as a daemon... It should be
easy to write a daemon that does this)
- automatic subscription and removal to deconf mailinglists (we can
provide fields for this in the database, yes, but I don't think it's
Comas' work to talk with mailman)
- password handling for website (Comas already has a session
scheme with Apache::Session... Probably we can make the other
components of Debconf work with our sessions. I don't want to fight
with Kerberos right now :)
Please note that Debconf is a _very_ different kind of conference from
what we have worked with (and, yes, we do not have such a big
experience, although we have worked with CONSOL and ICGTMP). Perhaps
the main difference is the expected usage Comas will have - At the
other conferences, the system was mostly used before the conference,
and then it froze - once the conference is running, we do not need
most of the system anymore (in the case of ICGTMP, we didn't even have
a network connection on side, regarding CONSOL, we did only have user
registrations and payments). We expect Comas to be thoroughly used
_during_ Debconf.
Andreas: There is something we must keep in mind: In CONSOL, our
server was _really_ bogged down, the last days it was quite painful to
work with. I do hope that Debconf, as it is much simpler than CONSOL,
will not mean too much load for our server... We will have to check on
how this evolves, maybe we should do some stress testing. Do you know
what kind of hardware will we use to host it?
Greetings,
--
[1] http://gborg.postgresql.org/mailman/listinfo/comas-devel
[2] :pserver:anonymous@gborg.postgresql.org:/usr/local/cvsroot/comas
password: anonymous
[3] http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?DebConf5TodoConferenceManagementSystem
--
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.org - (+52-55)1451-2244 / 5554-9450
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973 F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF
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