FOSS4G'13

The working site for the conference committee of FOSS4G 2013

Provisional Program Presentation Page

Posted by Barry Rowlingson on April 28, 2013

Its not finished but its here (URL hopefully not discoverable, don't make public, will move to a proper place when presenters have been informed):

http://2013.foss4g.org/provisional1234/

user can click the tag buttons to filter the displayed presentations.
user can click 'view details' to get long abstracts popup

if this is all good, then things to do:
I really think we should add project tags. People will want to know how many PostGIS/qgis talks there are, at any level. I'll start doing this... but its 2am and I'll just be tagging with zzzzs

Comments

Barry Rowlingson on April 28, 2013:

Have done a load more on this, including more tagging (on a spreadsheet of my own), data cleaning, formatting, etc.

Just needs to be put in a sensible place and made public.

Addy Pope on April 29, 2013:

Off topic - but does anyone know if we have a FOSS4G SurveyMonkey account?

Barry Rowlingson on April 29, 2013:

Threadjacker! SF says the AGI have one (in the basecamp at "Pledge Page"). I did think that could be used for pledge collection - see that thread for further ideas.

https://basecamp.com/1920286/projects/762306-foss4g-13/messages/10972118-pledge-page

I only sent that thread's emails to SF+Comms group to try and avoid information overload to the whole group. Hope that's okay.

Steven Feldman on April 29, 2013:

Barry if I said the program/tagging is awesome I would be understating! Thanks for what I know was a pretty massive effort over the weekend.

Can we keep this private until I have spoken with Claire and we have sent the mails out. 

Does hm get replaced with hacks or tips?

Barry Rowlingson on April 29, 2013:

It should say Hacks/Mashups now. The tag buttons on left have description popup text that could be changed too (its part of my tagdata spreadsheet) and comments welcome.

Also, I pruned out any tags with less than 3 presentations - this weeded out mapfish, leaflet, catastrophe, geomajas, newdevelopments, gvsig and gdalogr. I did most of the tagging from the title so there may be things in the abstracts to add that would increase these tag counts.

If I get a chance I'll try and upload my master spreadsheets - currently this is all derived from some CSV files on my PC (actually on dropbox for safety) which have had some edits from the 'Final' one on google docs.

Jo Cook on April 29, 2013:

I love it! Really nice work. Can I just sanity check- I see what you mean about tags with less than 3 presentations- can we verify that every presentation is definitely included somewhere?

Jo

Barry Rowlingson on April 29, 2013:

I think the 173 is the same number as the accepted presentations in my spreadsheet.
I think a presentation with no tags in the set would still appear, it would just not have any tags with it, and would only show up when 'Show All' was selected.
A quick look shows everything has at least one tag. Sanity checks definitely required (on me though).

Addy Pope on April 29, 2013:

looks great, any way to select multiple tags?  Probably too much effort for small gains in usability.

Barry Rowlingson on April 29, 2013:

Considered it, but thought that so many combos will end up with zero presentations it wasn't worth it. Easy enough to implement though, might have a play with that tonight.

Suchith Anand on April 29, 2013:

I also think that removing  any tags with less than 3 presentations is good idea. All presentations have multiple tags, so they will come in other tag search anyway .

Suchith

Jeremy Morley on April 29, 2013:

Of the tags that were pruned, I'd suggest putting "Catastrophe" (or, on reflection, maybe "Disaster response" is better) back in. It does suggest or sell a particular application area that's not implied elsewhere. The other pruned tags are essentially covered in another way.

Jeremy Morley on April 29, 2013:

I'd also suggest making the "Show All" button a little more prominent over the others (different colour / a little larger / line break underneath - something like that).

Jeremy Morley on April 29, 2013:

In terms of the multiple selection, when a first tag has been selected, you could make un-selectable the second tags producing no results?

Barry Rowlingson on April 29, 2013:

Can disaster recovery be lumped in with humanitarian? There's already another presentation on disaster relief in that category.

Jeremy Morley on April 29, 2013:

I guess so. Or why not add the DR tag to the humanitarian one? Or was that one of the ones with the Catastrophe tag already?  (Is your tagging in a Google Doc or just on your machine?)

How are the tags organised? Because they're not alphabetical it was a little tricky to fund "Humanitarian".

Barry Rowlingson on April 29, 2013:

If I tag all presentations on disaster relief, fire prevention, humanitarian action etc as 'Humanitarian' and have just the one tag for that, then that should work.

The ordering is ummm... the ordering of keys in a python dictionary. Alphabetical is a possibility but the random ordering encourages browsing. You can click on the tag badges in the presentation box and filter that way, so once you see a presentation of interest you can click to filter on that. Not sure how discoverable that mechanism is.

I don't get your last comment on multiple selection. Ah... I think I get it...

Click Tag A, show all presentations with Tag A, collect all tags in those presentations and only enable those tags. Hmm doable.

It all depends how long until we want to release this is....

Jeremy Morley on April 29, 2013:

Well it's releasable as-is, I'd say (though is"Funnies" a good tag?..). Could the upgraded tag search just slip in later as a page update?..

Barry Rowlingson on April 29, 2013:

I was going to tag the odd-ball talks as 'WTF' but thought better of it.

I also pondered a 'Tainted' tag for anything with non-open components and esri speakers.

But seriously... Note I'm not considering that this page is going to function as anything other than the provisional programme listing. For organising into streams and time slots we need a proper conference management solution. Am looking closely at some now.

Barry Rowlingson on April 29, 2013:

Okay, now with big friendly button, tag intersection mode, alphabetical tag ordering. Yeah, there's nothing to stop you drilling down until there's no matching presentations, but there's the big friendly button.

Jeremy Morley on April 29, 2013:

Very nice, I'll buy one.  (BTW, "Funnies" isn't in alphabetical order...)

Barry Rowlingson on April 29, 2013:

Oh yeah, fixed now (was sorting on the internal tag code instead of the label)

Jeremy Morley on April 29, 2013:

Now I'm just being fussy, but there's some text (can't read it or select it easily) that appears under the tag buttons when you select a tag and then deselect it.  Also, note that having no tags selected looks like the starting state of "show all" but in fact selects no papers and perhaps needs overriding?

Barry Rowlingson on April 30, 2013:

That's the copyright text in the footer - if the main body of the page is short then it floats up and crashes the sidebar which is fixed and so doesn't flow the footer down...

...which explains what that <hr> was doing there before I removed it. basically operating to clear the flow. stuck it back in, seems to have fixed it.

have also changed the behaviour so that if you end up with no presentations it puts a message and the big friendly button in the main body. There's still something not quite right cognitively and I think its because when the user deselects all toggles the two possibilities are showing none or going "showing none is pointless, lets show all" and the user sees everything. I've gone with showing none but making it easy for the user to show all or keep clicking tag toggle buttons.

its got to the point where the logic in the code is getting a bit fiddly, so I think if I wanted to change anything from now I'd probably start from a clean slate (in terms of how I'd do the javascript, that is).

Rollo Home on April 30, 2013:

Barry. This is absolutely amazing. Totally amazing.

Barry Rowlingson on April 30, 2013:

Cheers! Have you got an idea for when the programme group will be sorting it out into groups for streams? Because that's the point it needs to be in a CMS...

Claire Gilmour on April 30, 2013:

I have now contacted all presenters (successful, unsuccessful and the ones who need to choose or merge their papers).

Steven Feldman on April 30, 2013:

Thanks Claire

Barry, can we take the programme page live now?

Jeremy Morley on April 30, 2013:

Yes, sorry - I should also have said, great work Barry. Ready to go it seems to me!

Rollo... did you want to have a call on Friday morning to talk programme? (Sorry, thread-napping, we can take this to another thread...)

Barry Rowlingson on April 30, 2013:

One or two tweaks after claires messages earlier tido and its done. What
URL shall we put it under? /programBeta /programmeProvisional?

Jeremy Morley on April 30, 2013:

/paperSearch  ?

I wonder if we might keep this in some form, either parallel to the streaming or repurposed from tags to streams?

Steven Feldman on April 30, 2013:


How about http://2013.foss4g.org/programme/provisional-programme/ ?

I would keep this as a programme search with tags even when the timetable is published. Possibly add the Streams as additional tags with some colour coding to indicate difference?

Barry Rowlingson on April 30, 2013:

Errr No. Remember what I said about any changes requireing a from-scratch rewrite? That. This is quite a hack on several levels. The page is generated from some CSV files which are read in via python code and then the page is created via a mako template.
To do anything further I would:
  • Do a proper requirements analysis
  • Develop it as a database-backed web application (in Django)
  • Take about a month or two
  • Probably end up duplicating most of Symposion.
I'd like the programme ctte to have a look at Symposion - I think it'll do the job - PyCon US use it, ApacheCon NA use it and so on. It's 10 times better than the conferencer plugin we are using for sponsors on Wordpress at the moment. We might even be able to ditch Wordpress for it!
I wanted to get a bit further in exploring Symposion at the weekend but I spent it hacking javascript. Might do more this week.
 I've had a few emails from the Symposion guys about hosting and support but they want $1000 up front for 10 hours of support time (which can including theming, custom coding) and $100/month for hosting on their servers.
It installs really easily, so we could just pony up a fraction of that for another amazon host and DIY.
My recommendation is
  • Get everything into a conference content management system
  • Ditch the spreadsheets!

Barry Rowlingson on April 30, 2013:

So there are still two outstanding merge/fight issues to clear.

Jansen has two papers, has been asked to choose one of two
Genuchten and Ticheler have been asked to choose one of theirs

We could either:
  • wait
  • pick one of each arbitrarily until we hear otherwise
I don't think putting both into the provisional programme is a good idea, they might think we've changed our minds and included both.

Rollo Home on May 1, 2013:

Barry - go for the later option (it will prompt a response if we get the wrong paper!). This is a provisional list, so we *will* be changing things if need be.
Would be ideal to publish this list asap - it will create a huge buzz.

Barry Rowlingson on May 1, 2013:

Agreed. The soonest I can do that is tonight (bloody day job) and perhaps by then we may have heard from the mergerers.

Steven Feldman on May 1, 2013:

Once the program page goes live can we get a press release out and postings on all of the relevant mailing lists including cross post to OSM lists. We want to remind people that the Early Bird closes at the end of May

Antony Scott on May 10, 2013:

Just to say (having been away since the F2F) that the programme page on the website is excellent, about the most useful presentation of a conference programme I have seen. Plaudits to Barry and whoever else was involved...

Jeremy Morley on May 10, 2013:

Barry did the work, Antony. We just interfered. 

Steven Feldman on May 10, 2013:

Some of us interfered less helpfully than others (mea culpa)