Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2006 15:15:33 -0700
From: David Weekly
To: shdh@googlegr...com
Subject: SDX: The Audience Is Hacking
So, wow. Thanks everyone for an absolutely fantastic and EPIC
DevHouse. It was arguably our most successful one so far, with an
estimated 90 uniques and a huge amount accomplished. Everyone had a
great time.
So here's what we talked about at the post-mortem:
WHAT WORKED WELL:
- A staggered layout for tables and couches in the front room
produced a much more open and comfortable feel. This was universally
given a thumbs up.
- Having garbage cans in more places helped make cleanup easier.
- The front rooms were more open, which gave us more options and made
setup easier.
- The "seed group" started off in the kitchen, which helped dynamics.
- Setup and cleanup were blazingly fast and effective.
- Plenty of caffeine for people
WHAT DIDN'T WORK WELL
- No paper plates, few napkins or cups
- Food chaotically intermingled with caffeine stacks
- Caffeine and snacks arrived late
- 2 large pizzas insufficient to feed masses of hungry hackers
- Continuing Internet issues with connectivity, latency, and packet loss
- Not enough recycling containers - cans intermingled with trash
- Ice issues
SDX
People agreed that we should try something fun / different for the
tenth DevHouse. An idea floated earlier of having a business
competition resurfaced and garnered group approval. The concept is to
allow "teams" of people to compete in being first to create complete
"money printing machine" businesses. Teams are given the theme on
Friday night (6pm?) and a login on their own VPS server provided by
Simpli. They must stop all development by Sunday night 11:59pm. The
winner is decided two weeks later by whomever has accrued the most
revenue. We discussed levels of interaction teams could have with the
service after Sunday night, and it was agreed that shutting off server
access would be sufficient. This would allow for promotion and user
support but not bugfixing and certainly not for feature addition.
(Those found to have hacked around these restrictions would be
disqualified.) Domain names would be preregistered and preconfigured
to be either "Finnish" or "Star Wars" themed. It was suggested we
could give Viking helmets vs Star Wars masks to a team depending on
their choice of domain.
Consensus was that this would be fun to do, different, newsworthy, and
could produce fascinating results. It was agreed that it might end up
being a bad idea in retrospect, but that we should go ahead and try it
anyhow as an experiment.
PLANNING
SDX will tentatively take place on Saturday, June 3rd. Location is
TBD, but Chris Messina should see if we can use the France Telecom
space. We need to nail down location ASAP. There will be a planning
meeting for SDX to nail down logistics, register the domain names,
decide on a theme, and get the judging tools written sometime mid next
month. I here propose the evening of THURSDAY MAY 18 to get everything
set up.
We're going to send out this initial info to the shdh-announce list as
soon as folks here give it the thumbs up. So please respond with your
thoughts. :)
Cheers,
David
PS: Credits to Tantek for "The Audience is Hacking"
PPS: Mad props to Chris for the killer design for SHDH9
PPPS: Mad props to Kitt for the massive T-Shirt donation!!
PPPPS: Thanks to Simpli for the caffeine. :)
