12:55 a.m.
Hey, update on the Olin Etherpad FAD,
Thought I would keep you all in the loop. Here's what I'm thinking for a
general talk for the Olin community. Should be cool. Now to work on budget
and advertising.
Mel, heads up, we need to budget. Still some up in the air stuff. Jon
Stanley and Spot. And trying to see about getting admissions room for
someone and maybe putting someone up at Babson Executive Center (kinda
pricey, in my cheap-college opinion). Just budget the worst case scenario?
Colin
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Colin Zwiebel <colin(a)zonion.org>
Date: Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 12:57 AM
Subject: Re: Etherpad FAD Update -- 90%
To: Jeff Mitchell <mitchell(a)kde.org>
Ahh, details, details.
The reason I keep referring to Java is because I think the build systems are
going to have to be Ant or Maven, more likely known by a J2EE person. I
guess I should just call them Ant/Mavenites =P
Okay, real questions. Now that I'm back at Olin I've met with a few people.
We would like to have you talk about something that will really pull in Olin
students. Oliners students are quite particular about their specific
interests. We have brought in Nobel laureates and have almost no-one show to
the talk. Then we bring in the Harmonix developers and the whole school
shows up.
I realize I don't know much about your background. Do you do UI/UX? Coding?
S Community involvement? A combination of the above.
I'm asking because grabbing attention at Olin is kinda tricky. You have
great content. I think Oliners would be really interested to hear about
Amarok. It is the format, not the content that will grab or leave Oliner's
attention. I'm trying to brainstorm a bit how to take something like your
KDE 4 release talk and put it in a context that Oliners will just eat up.
I'm just brainstorming here
Tag Line: Amarok -- building music that frees your library (/building music
that lets you rediscover your music)
Content: History, philosophy, and design of Amarok
Tag Line: Managing software built by volunteers on 6 continents -- Project
management of Amarok
Content: History, goals of the project, decision making, meeting deadlines
Tag Line: Analytics and music -- How Amarok and last.fm remove noise from
your own music library
Content: History of Amarok-Last.fm, recommendations, how it works
A few things I think Oliners will just love regardless
* Demo/mockups
** Show off an alpha version or mockups
** Watch eyes glaze over
** We *need *to have this!
* "Engineering story"
** Description of an implementation, hurdle, problem solved
** Think TED talk "we built a 100m telescope in space using origami. Here's
the story"
* Skills and practical advice
** In project management, do this
** Team dynamics are best preserved like X
*Design
** Every major has a design "core"
** Hearing about design decisions is cool
So, the big disclaimer is I don't even know if you're able to talk about,
say, project management.
I would like to get people excited about OSS, so a push for open-source
contributions, or Amarok, or the KDE community is a must. Oooh, forgot, you
ranted a bit about the EP community. I think Oliners would love to hear
about that. EP community v. KDE would be cool. You could just rail on EP
then describe KDE.
Aaand if that all sounds like preparing a whole new presentation, you could
do something you already have, keep it short, and I'll field you questions
that Oliners would want to know (and which they might not want to ask):
"I often here that if you can't code, you can't help out on an open-source
project, what about non-code contributors, what all happens in KDE?"
"What is music brainz, did KDE help develop it, and how does it make desktop
music better for me?"
Basically, just let me know what here catches your eye and isn't another few
days of work on your part. Oh, and point out what assumptions I've made
about you, Amarok, KDE are wrong--keeps me from sending you stupid titles.
Colin
P.S. Looking up AmaroK information from your blog and talks. Really
interesting stuff. I had never heard of Solid. Also, I don't recognize the
plasma widget integration. Maybe that was before KDE went all gray.
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Jeff Mitchell <mitchell(a)kde.org> wrote:
On 8/31/2010 6:09 AM, Colin Zwiebel wrote:
> I think thats fine. My guess is we'll have a few different types of
> people showing up. Some will show because they are Java whizzes and want
> to hack on EtherPad. Others will be less inclined to jump straight in
> (for now :] ) and more interested in hearing a talk.
I again want to remind you that EtherPad is not written in Java. It's
written in JavaScript and Scala.
--Jeff