open event

Open Event: Planning the Scheduler UI

{ Repost from my personal blog @ https://blog.codezero.xyz/planning-the-scheduler-ui/ }

In the first phase of the GSoC coding period, Saptak Sengupta and myself have been working on the Scheduler UI.

The Scheduler UI would allow the organizers to graphically schedule/manage the sessions in their conference/event.

Event-Organizer by Josh Greco has been a major inspiration for the timeline design. The css styles have been borrowed from that project.

After some research, we have decided to use the interact.js javascript library for implementing drag-drop and resizing functionality to the project and lodash for array/collection manipulations and for some useful utility functions.

The following tasks have been formulated:

  • Drag-and-drop interface to add session blocks into a timeline ✓
  • Resize sessions to change time ✓
  • load live data from the server using the API ✓
  • Handle session clashes within a track properly ✓
  • Add Track button that opens up a modal to add a track. ✓
  • Search option for unscheduled sessions ✓
  • Save each session change/update using the API
  • Option to Export timeline as pdf
  • Option to export timeline/calendar as iCal

An umbrella issue (#349) has been created in the open-event-orga-serverrespository to track the progress. There will be a separate issue created for each task when that task is being worked upon and the same would be referred to in the umbrella issue.

We are targeting GSOC 2016: Milestone 4 (Due by June 12, 2016) to finish the Scheduler UI and we are confident that we’ll be able to reach our target. *fingers-crossed* :sweat_smile:

To know more about the Scheduler UI, read Enhancing the Open Event Server: Scheduler UI.

Continue ReadingOpen Event: Planning the Scheduler UI

Next steps to an Open Event Android Applications

This year also I’ll be working on the FOSSASIA Open Event project for Google Summer of Code 2016. It’s an honour to be working with such an elite team of people. We have 10 people working on Open event this time : 6 on the server and 2 each on the client apps ( Android and Webapp)

So what are our plans for this year, let’s have a look :

The system was basically setup last year but when used it for FOSSASIA 2016, we got to know the bugs it had and it was these bugs that made it unusable. for instance, the server had lack of permissions which allowed anyone to come and change data on the server which is why instead of using the server, we went with a spreadsheet and made a parser to convert the spreadsheet data into json files. So we made this Scraper that we used to create json files and commit them to github repo. We used this json as Github Api and made a website here that displays a neat schedule.

For the android app, since the json was not of the original format we used while building the server, it was buggy because it didn’t show data at a lot of places and we saw the need for many other features like live sessions, notifications for changes in timings, broadcasts from the organisers etc. That is why we have Open Event this time again as a GSoC project and it’s bigger this time with 10 students and almost as much mentors. Justin is heading the mentors team this time along with Mario to guide us into making the system perfect.

On the Android side me and Harshit Dwivedi will be taking care of everything. Since I was at FOSSASIA 2016, I talked to a lot of attendees and got to know their feedback therefore I know what all we need to include and will work really hard to make the system a success.

Adios till the next post!

Continue ReadingNext steps to an Open Event Android Applications

79 issues done in one week!

Have you ever wondered how to achieve such a result?

Screen Shot 2016-05-31 at 12.09.51I couldn’t believe that we’ve solved such many issues in Milestone 2. The 79 is 34% of all issues, isn’t it amazing? I think that defining what kind of project do we want to develop and what features should it have allows us to move quickly and cooperate with the whole team very effectively.

What you need to achieve similar score?

First of all, you need to prepare good document which help a whole team to get familiar with the project and its features. The most important part is to describe very precisely step by step a project flow, and features required to implement. It can help us to avoid obstacles, tie-ups and questions related to flow, because every developer is able to go through the document and find a desired answer.

Secondly, you need to define a target what are we going to achieve and when. Based on this info developers can define plan of work easily. We have divided 3 month period into 15 milestones. In each end of milestone we talk what we have achieved, what has been done, what hasn’t been done and what are we going to do in next week.

Daily, also works well in our team, because we are able to monitor what is currently happening in project. And you can quickly help if someone has a problem.

Flow of solving issues is very simple(Justin configured a CI). We have two branches – master and testing. Writing tests is essential to do before writing code. If tests are ready and passed successfully we can create a pull request. Then other developers review our code and finally if everything is ok we can merge changes with testing branch.

Continue Reading79 issues done in one week!

Open Source Event App Development

Some background about myself, I am a 3rd year Information Technology student from JSS Academy of Technical Education, Noida, India. I love Front-end development and is currently working on an awesome project Open-Event .

The project will make it easier for the events, tech summits to create a web app and mobile app quickly by providing necessary information such as speakers for the event, sessions, tracks, location etc. The project itself consists of three core components :
1. Open-Event Organiser Server
2. Open-Event Android App
3. Open-Event Web app
It’s the end of community bonding period before the past week, which was the best time to get ourselves familiar with the practices of the community, understanding of the codebase, making new friends and setting up goals. I have already set up my goals and is working on Open-event-web app.

The first version of the web app is to make the web app functional by just uploading a JSON file, the second part is to make it sync with the REST API provided by the Orga-server. I with Arnav have created the User-Story for the web app. Also, I have created the data-flow for the work, we will be carrying forward.

I am having a good time, and will work hard to complete the goals of the project.

Thanks

Continue ReadingOpen Source Event App Development

Rest-API implementation in the flask Open Event Application

These days are getting so worked up. For the first time in my life, I have to attend to around 40 emails a day. If you count the replies with them, it will be well over 150. Things have got so busy.

To start off, our project is called Open Event. Open Event is a software suite to help people manage events, summits, conferences etc with relative ease. The organizers will have the power to manage sessions, speakers, tracks and schedule from a clean and user-friendly interface.

They can auto-tweet the sessions, generate a google calendar, post to social networks and do other fancy things with just a click of the button. Then there are android apps for both attendees and organizers. The organizers can use the app to manage the event whereas the attendees can use it to get details about upcoming events, give reviews, vote on stuff and so on. From the web interface, rich data can be shown about the event like the number of sessions, distinct speakers, schedule and other statistics. In other words, a website can be easily generated for the event. Apart from that, the project will feature a rich API which can used by other services to build up on it.

My part

Me and @shivamMg are responsible for the REST API part of the project. The plan is to build a full-proof API that will cover the entire scope of the application.

We have started the work using Flask-Restplus as the framework. The GET API part has been done. Now what is needed is to add the PUT, POST and DELETE verbs.

We will soon get to it and plan to have a basic version ready before the midterm (26th June). Once midterm is done, we will work on enhancing the API, finding and fixing bug cases, writing docs and improving overall project quality.

This is getting so much fun. The next 3 months will be full of heavy coding. Probably my GitHub streak will cross 100 days :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:. I am learning so much with every day that passes.

As many as 10 people are working on the Open Event project this summer. Working in such a big group project will be a new experience for me and I am so glad to be a part of it.

That’s all for now. See ya !!

{{ Repost from my personal blog http://aviaryan.in/blog/gsoc/so-it-begins.html }}

Continue ReadingRest-API implementation in the flask Open Event Application

Setting up Our Project Organization and Work Flows

Finally the community bonding period has ended and the actual work has started.

So what was the community bonding period all about?

Well this one month long period was provided to us so that we can go through the existing code base of our project, get in touch with our mentors become familiar with the community’s work environment and set a set of milestones that are to be achieved throughout the summer.

Though some of the students already do this work while they are preparing to apply with the Organization i.e. In the month of Feb and March, still going through the milestones once again and discussing them with other selected students and mentors is always a healthy practice.

With my Organization (FOSSASIA) these milestones were made in a separate document by me and Manan Wason in form of a User Story which had a set of features that are required by the User of the App.

Features having higher priority were assigned an earlier deadline whereas the less important ones were assigned a later date.

We also had to provide a daily scrum email to the mentors highlighting the work done by us the earlier day and what we planned to do today.

Sounds good, now what?

Well the main focus now is to create more issues on the github repository according to the points mentioned in thee User Story and send patches to fix them.

As you might have noticed in the User story doc, we are planning to have 2 apps, one for the normal public and another for the event organizers and speakers.

So we are planning to get the public release done by the mid term evaluations (27th June).

Tho there are many features in the app that are yet to be implemented and while I am still learning how to implement most of them, still I’m sure that I will be able to pull it off by this summer.

Ugh, what was your project about?!

Did I not mention that? Dang!

FOSSASIA’s OpenEvent Android app aims to consolidate important information about FOSSASIA’s developer conference, into a single easy-to-use app along with giving the user much-needed important extra features.

Moreover as the app is open source anyone can fork it, replace the existing APIs with his custom ones and create a custom app for any event that they are planning to host.

Well my project this summer is to enhance the FOSSAsisa’s open event android app along with Manan Wason and Arnav Gupta.

Our end goal is to make our app’s code to be used for the Google I/O 2017 and Facebook’s F8 developer conference. (Pretty Rad right?)

So that was all about my project and plans for this summer.

Hope to have a great learning experience and kudos to you for giving your time to go through this ‘not so well’ written doc. 😅

Until next time. 👋 👋

Continue ReadingSetting up Our Project Organization and Work Flows

Enhancing the Open Event Server: Scheduler UI

{ Repost from my personal blog @ https://blog.codezero.xyz/enhancing-open-event-scheduler-one/ }

The community bonding period went pretty well. Worked on the OpenTechSummit 2016‘s website. Fixed a few issues. Got to know the team. :smile:

Now comes the coding period which started yesterday (23rd May 2016).
In the first phase, I (Niranjan Rajendran) will be primarily working on creating a Scheduler tool for each event. Saptak Sengupta and myself will be working on this.

The Scheduler would allow the organizers to graphically schedule/manage the sessions in their conference/event. The proposed features for the Scheduler are:

  1. Drag-and-drop sessions into tracks on a timeline.
  2. Change the timings of the sessions by resizing the sessions’ element on the timeline.
  3. Create a new event by dragging a time period on the timeline.
  4. Create new tracks.
  5. Switch between timelines of the different days of the event.
  6. Load existing sessions from the database into the timeline.
  7. Print the timeline or convert it into a PDF file.
  8. Export the schedule in different formats such as iCalendar.

The scheduler UI would not be practical on small screens (Mobile phones) and would be hard to use. So, we will be thinking of some alternative – a simpler interface for smaller screens.

Continue ReadingEnhancing the Open Event Server: Scheduler UI

Organizer Server and REST APIs

The Open Event Organizer Server is a server application written in Flask. It provides an admin interface for the organizers of events to manage events and related services like Sessions, Tracks, etc. Additionally it provides GET APIs for developers to read data from the server. These APIs are consumed by the Open Event Webapp and Android Client to display details to the users. The existing APIs could only fetch data. My is to create REST APIs that write data to the server.

Developers are divided into groups with every group handling one aspect of the project. Avi Aryan and I would be working on REST APIs. Currently I’m working on porting the existing GET APIs to newer spec. Justin decided on our stack and technologies we would be working with (link). We are using Flask-Restplus extension for building APIs.

The write API is not going to be the only big change to the server. The new authorization system is also going to change a lot. It would include more user roles, with each of them having different set of permissions. Apart from the Administrator and Organizer, a user can be:

  • Attendee
  • Moderator
  • Speaker
  • Track Organizer

Other changes to User Management are mentioned in the docs.

Besides these, adding support for OAuth 2.0 is also on the list. This would let users sign up through Social Media platforms.

I had thought of a possible work flow for my group.

  1. Port existing GET APIs with newer spec on Flask-Restplus.
  2. Add the user roles mentioned above to the authorization system. A user role defines what type of services a user has access to. For example, an Attendee has write access to feedback and rating system for Sessions but he does not have permissions to create or modify Tracks. This needs to be done before creating write (POST/PUT/DELETE) APIs, so that access to services can be defined according to the user roles. The GET APIs are public and do not require any such permissions.
  3. Create write APIs.
  4. Set up user authentication system to register and sign in users.
  5. Add support for OAuth 2.0.

Many of these changes require other changes to the server. Like the feedback and rating system for Attendees has not been implemented yet and would first require definitions for its database models. Existing models would also require changes. A lot of work to do.

I have previously worked with Python and Django. This project brings a lot of new stuff for me. Python2, Flask, Swagger and RESTful APIs. Duke, Justin and Mario are going to be mentors for the Organizer Server. All in all, this summer is going to be an exciting one 😀.

About Me:

I’m Shivam, a 3rd year Computer Engineering student from College of Technology, Pantnagar. This is my first attempt at GSOC and I’m grateful to FOSSASIA for accepting my proposal. I started out with FOSSASIA by contributing to their Open Source projects.

Continue ReadingOrganizer Server and REST APIs

Enhancing Open Event Organizer Server

Today, the coding phase of GSoC 2016 starts and marks the beginning of the implementation of all the prototypes and brainstormed ideas. Open Event Organizer Server as explained previously is the backend server for the organizers to create events, sessions, mark tracks, add social links, date/time, etc. It acts as the dashboard for creating data which then gets displayed through the client side apps , i.e open event webapp and android app. Sounds perfect. But as we know there is always scope for improvement.

So, this year we focus on making the server even better. The purpose is not only to make it more useful and powerful with added features but also to make it intuitive for the organizer so that the app can be used to its fullest benefits. A lot of brainstorming by a lot many students and mentors of this project have resulted in a final protoype to be implemented with some features and a better UI.

Some of the features that we have decided to add are:

  • API authentication to provide proper permissions. This helps in improving the overall security.
  • Oauth authentications. No more registration required. The organizer can straightaway use their google, fb and other login credentials to login and create events.
  • Social Links. The organizer can now add social links for their events such as google plus event link, facebook event link, hashtag values, etc.
  • Schedule UI. Now the organizer can directly add the events in calendar and get notified on that particular day. One can also export it in different formats.
  • Overall UI Improvement. We aim to make the UI much more intuitive and easier to use for the organizer so that all the features can be used to its fullest advantage.

This is briefly the aim for making open event organizer server bigger, better and more useful. With this aim, we start our coding today and try to provide a great product by the end of GSoC 2016. A product so good that every event organizer starts using this. Looking forward to making it a success.

Continue ReadingEnhancing Open Event Organizer Server

Vote for Open Event in Google Impact Challenge

Please vote for Open Event in the Google Impact Challenge: https://impactchallenge.withgoogle.com/deutschland/charity/lxde

The idea of Open Event is to give organizers and participants a tool to plan events and distribute information to attendees. We are working on an organizers server and mobile apps (https://github.com/fossasia/open-event).

Your vote for Open Event will support the development of the project. Thank you!

Continue ReadingVote for Open Event in Google Impact Challenge