Etherpad Post FAD (That was sooo last week)
One week ago this time the Etherpad FAD at Olin College ended. I think its about time for a recap.
More Pictures
After some dramatic shots of day 1, we have dramatic shots of day 2:
Kevin explains the mysteries of the Operational Transformation algorithm to Andy. 
Strikeout! Another library bites the dust. I think Sebastian might be trying to take credit for Spots handywork. 
Dramatic sunlight over the penguin clan. 
So I didn't actually take pictures at lunch (hackers, did you? I want to see), but those foodie bloggers say my Masala Art Murgh Tikka Masala looked like this. It sure tasted at least that good.
And then a few round of shots on Red Hats ta... I mean... per stories of the original FudCon, thought we'd pass on drinks this time.
Back for more hacking. Evidently, something etherpad was less appealing than the Murgh Tikka Masala.
We heard from Jeff Mitchell about open source communities. His talk ("Give a Cat a Scratching Post and Watch It Claw your Sofa -- or Building and Managing Communities") was fantastic and I hope it will be available in due time when he feels the slides are finalized. (Jeff is cool enough to be in the Wikimedia Commons. Note to self to upload my cat one of these days). 
And of course, we got some work done. Licensing research. I think these board notes are courtesy of DJ who was one of many people to do battle with the many codebases used by Etherpad.
There's a First Time for Everything
I have a confession to make. I have never been to a FAD, in fact, not long ago I was lamenting the plethora of acronyms floating around the world of Fedora--including FAD. But there is nothing quite as exhilarating as blindly diving head first into the shark infested waters.
Nah, the FAD went well. Meeting new people, chatting about OSS software and the new Gap logo, running in coding mode (which even counters the temptations of delicious Indian food), and barreling thorough tasks, we had a good mix.
Having not done a FAD, I took a rather hands off role. I suspect we would have well to have some more structure, but I think people also appreciated being able to work their own style. We were also hampered by traffic. Rush hour + beginning of Labor Day weekend -- not good. It would have been easier to have a kickoff meeting if the average drive time wasn't something like 2 hours.
It was interesting to see how certain issues I worried about pre-FAD didn't matter at all during the event. Being available on IRC was a total non-issue. We had someone on #etherpad while we were hacking, but it was used for nothing more than link sharing. I wouldn't have minded more remote engagement, but given the benefits of being physically present. I think its a lot easier to get remote engagement during FudCon. You know, Fedora hackers the globe over perk their ears and tune into Arizona with the thought of contributing.
Pictures, pictures, we needed more. I want to show you how good our lunch was, or Jeff presenting this slide. Next time I'll get one of these and capture everything. (Okay, point and shoot trigger happiness would be a little easier).
Highlights
20 or so Olin Students were enlightened with the good word of Git by Kevin Mehall.
Etherpad upstream running with on OpenJDK with non-free libraries replaced!
7+ libraries packaged at the FAD (kudos Jon, Spot, Sebastian)
Dozens of licences evaluated for FOSS-ness (kudos DJ, Jon, Spot)
JSON.org "for good not evil" libraries removed and replaced by libJson (by Sam who jumped right into unfamiliar territory of Scala)
95% update of a Java database library (lib c3p0) to be compatible with Java 1.6 (awesome stuff Crawford)
At which I should admit that we aren't done. There are still a few loose strings to tie up on packaging. c3p0 needs some Ant love. Spec file needs updating. But we're so close, give it a week or two and Etherpad will be in your repo.
Heard some great stories of Red Hat in the good old days from Spot (I'm hoping the Fedora/Red Hat fedora hats come back).
Learned a great deal about Operational Transformation, content editable, and some of the technologies behind real-time collaborative editors (Kevin).
Discovered some of the nastier trade offs of Java projects (lack of api stability, tendency to bundle libraries, etc). Really great insight into the world of Java, enterprise applications, and advantages of verbose languages/markup (unlike our web-startup friends who tend to find xml a fashion taboo). Thanks there Crawf, DJ, Sam, Spot, and Jon.
Thanks greatly to Jeff Mitchell for talking into an extended discussion of communities. Including the extended consideration of the term "fork" and the GitHub's "fork me" advertising. Hope that discussion continues around a possible Fedora Community Board.
I was totally blown away by the dedication of the hackers. John Stanley comes to mind apologizing to taking a few glances at his Facebook page. We wouldn't have been able to accomplish anything if not for the dedication. Thanks everyone for that.
And there were a lot of ideas tossed around for other uses of Etherpad. Modularize the software into an engine component. Use etherpad for collaborative tex documents (maybe Ray would love to do this)? How about wikis based on real time editing? Embeddable etherpad documents? The sky is the limit.
Thanks again to everyone who helped out. Believe me, this isn't the last you've seen of me (and hopefully not the last you've seen of Olin).
Cheers,
Colin
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Computercolin
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Edit 17 Oct 2010 21:38 Eastern
Just found some more whiteboard images DJ send me earlier. Here ya go:
