Open Event

So, we intended to write “Open Event” to allow event/conference organisers to be able to have their own website, and android app without having to code or build them. Our GSoC project is not yet complete, and we are adding new feartures everyday, but it is at a stage where, if you have a small event to host in your school or something, you can take a shot at it, to get versed with how the server works and how the app and website is generated.

The “Open Event” system consists of a server (code), where organisers make an event database, and add list and details of all speakers, sessions, sponsors, locations etc.

We currently have a dev and staging server set up, where organisers can create an account and try out the interface. Neither of these servers are production servers, and their databases keep getting reset when we change code, so use them only to learn how the server dashboard works for now, not to host your final event data.

Next, the organisers might want to have a webapp (code). The webapp is just a responsive, mobile friendly website that shows the details of the events in a easily readable format for the attendees. To create your own webapp, you need to fork this repository and adjust the parameters of the config.js to represent your app.

var config = {
"title": "OpenEvent", // Title of your event.

“apiBaseGetUrl”: “http://open-event.herokuapp.com/get/api/v1/”, // Base URL of the orga-server from where data comes.

“eventId”: “3”, // The event-id of your event
.
“use_testApi”: false // Must set to false, or else uses testcase json files.
};

After changing the config.js, you can deploy the webapp on any webserver that supports hosting static files (example bitballoon.com), or you can host it via github by creating a gh-pages branch, like the example app.

Next, the organisers, can create and deploy an android app (code) for their event. There are some automated configuration options still left to be manipulated, but organisers need to change the BASE_URL variable, in the Urls.java file to point to the data server, and change the package name to their liking in build.gradle. The app can be built using the command ./gradlew build . We have a FDroid flavour, that uses Open Street Maps instead of Google Maps and is completely and purely FOSS.

The idea of Open Event is to build an App and Management Utility for Tech Conferences and related events. It was selected under Google Summer of Code 2015. I will be working with the organisation FOSSASIA which is the largest Open Source organisation in Asia. To add to my excitement, my mentor is @mariobehling who is none other than the founder of Lubuntu. And my other mentor is @dukeleto who has been teaching us a lot of useful stuff like how to write scrum mails, manage issue tracking and documentation on github, among others.

So, let me describe a little more about the project. We call it ‘Open Event’, and we aim to make it a easy to use solution for all Open Source (or otherwise) event/conference/seminar/workshop organisers to be able to host data about their sessions, speakers, tracks, and be able to show this to the attendees using a Webapp and an Android App. You can always read more about the project goals and track the current progress at the umbrella project on Github.

Rafal is mainly working on the server that will host the data and he’s writing that up in Python, and using flask-admin to create the dashboard. Manan is responsible for the Android app (which I secretly wish I had got, because I love to work more on Android than anything else), while I am going to create the webapp .

The idea behind both the Android and webapp will be to allow event organisers to generate their own apps, without having much technical knowledge. Ideally, when our project is finished, The organisers should be able to create an Android app and a webapp, without writing a single line of code. They would just fill the event name, the color scheme etc, and then fill the data about the sessions, speakers, sponsors, tracks, locations etc of the event.

We hope by the end of the summer we can be ready with a service/product that all event organisers would love to use to host their events on in the future. I’ll follow this blog post up soon with technical details about each component, and the API schema we have adopted.

Right now, it’s 4 days past the ‘coding start’ date, and I have not coded a lot, because I have spent most of my time trying to learn AngularJS, which was very new to me. I should get back to writing more code, and stop writing blog articles, or else Duke and Mario won’t be too happy with me 😛