I’ve started working on getting the first Realities hackathon and focused development week off the ground. Seeing that the first use case for Realities is the Borderland, we’d like to have a version of it ready around January 2019. This means that we’d have to get started as soon as possible.
Currently, @erikfrisk is working on getting the basics ready. By the time he’s done, the Borderland will have an event on October 20th to test the current version and to define some feature requests, recommendations and use cases. After that, we’re ready to do a Particip.io hackathon to experiment and co-design, followed by a focused development week where 2-4 people will work full time on getting the next release of Realities ready and running.
Currently, my idea is to have a hackathon followed by a development week in the last two weeks of November.
Proposed dates, pending availability of developers, are:
Hackathon: November 16-18
Focused development: November 19-25
For the Hackathon, we need a mix of skilled developers and other people with great ideas and the willingness to learn and contribute. It will be open to up to 10 people, and accommodation, food and travel are payed for.
For the development week, only people who’ve already contributed to the code before the hackathon are eligible. Being on this team for the week following the hackathon means that accommodation for that week is payed for, and in addition to that there is 1000 EUR compensation for 7 days together (and also, I imagine, quite a bit of fun). Following a hackathon with a development week also allows people who’ve contributed to the hackathon to spend some time with us during the development weeks and, if they want to, put in some volunteer hours and contribute to the code to be eligible for future development weeks or freelance work.
Since we need experience with the codebase for the development week, that means that we’re probably limited to the eight developers who’ve currently contributed to the Realities repository on GitHub. This means that I need commitment from at least some of them to make these dates work, and I’ve reached out to them to post their availability status here. However, if someone else makes vetted contributions to the repository in the coming month, that person could be eligible too, but I’m not counting on that on such short notice.
Location of the hackathon and development week will depend a bit on the availability of key developers to travel, but if possible I’m pretty excited about the idea to maybe base it in Medenine, Tunisia. @haykel and @Yosser, still in early stages and can’t confirm anything right now, but what do you think about that?