BarnCamp 2011 Hack Session Proposals

This page is for adding Hack session proposals for future BarnCamp-style events and will most likely be used to develop the work sessions to take place during BarnCamp 2011.

Hack sessions are an opportunity for people to getting together and work on a bigger project. The project could be a technical one, or it could be about strategy, writing, design, building something, whatever.

We use the term 'Hack' because it a more playful way of exploring a subject than a Work Session. For us here, to Hack is to playfully break apart something to help to understand it more. It's primarily thought that it's a chance for a group of people to be all together in the right space at the same time and get share knowledge of something.

A hack session might last somewhere between four hours and a whole day, and could lead to ongoing work throughout the rest of the BarnCamp event, should those involved wish to do so.

For BarnCamp 2011, the work sessions are scheduled to take place on Friday 10th June.

Template

Copy and use the following template to describe your work session proposal:

Title of Work Session

Proposed by

put your name or alias here

Type/Field

programming, design, strategy, writing, editing, sustainability, 12 volt, cooking, whatever really.

Duration

put time in minutes, e.g. 45 mins

Required space

e.g. indoor, outdoor, field, barn, river

Facilities

say whether you need computers, a projector, a sledge hammer, etc.

Description

say something about your workshop in this space, write as much or as little as you like at this present time.

Yep, I'm interested

• edit this page
• and add your name to
• the list of those interested
• in the session

Proposals

IndyLive

Proposed by

adelayde@oximc

Skill sets

programmers, designers, journalists, strategists

Duration

four hours minimum

Required space

indoor/barn

Facilities

we'd need internet access, a flip chart and some computers.

Description

recently Oxford IMC has been playing about with an special "indylive" page to cover events. This page does the controversial act of pulling a live Twitter feed in to it. We'd like to take it further and produce a template for it to use at a UK level. Let's have a workshop to discuss what we can do, privacy and political issues that may come up, and get down to some coding to get a reasonable prototype running. The current prototype is at Oxford IMC at http://ox4.org/~oimc/index.php

Penguin addition - Here's the code (I did throw it together very quickly - I'm not proud of it!). http://oximc.org.uk/live.tar.gz

Yep, I'm interested

• adelayde
• penguin
• chickpea

Using Drupal for Aggregation

Proposed by

adelayde@oximc, m3shrom & penguin

Skill sets

programmers, designers, users, journalists, strategists

Duration

four hours minimum, but probably a day would be good.

Required space

indoor/barn

Facilities

we'd need internet access, a flip chart and some computers.

Description

A look at Drupal 6 and 7 to see how it can work in an aggregation context. Aggregation is where one website gets content from other websites. IFI Watchnet is an example of a site using aggregation - http://www.ifiwatchnet.org/.

There has been a lot of activity using a Drupal 6 Aggregation Code base developed by ekes which pulls in a content from other sources and presents them flexibly by content type, source (location) and subject tags. This has been given a fresh theme and is online http://bethemedia.org.uk . We'll look under the bonnet to see how this site is created and hack about and tweak it to get a better working understanding of it.

Suggest topic is let's see if we can make an aggregation site about the anti-cuts movement.

Yep, I'm interested

• adelayde
• penguin
• chickpea
• mick