Since the 4th of May, I’m officially an accepted GSoC student at the awesome OSEM project, in the FOSDEM organization.

What is OSEM?

OSEM or the Open Source Event Manager is a web application, written in Ruby on Rails, that focuses on helping people organize and manage conferences. It was initially developed to accommodate the needs of oSC13, and has been used for every oSC since. The list of organizations and conferences using OSEM include GNOME, ownCloud, PGConf US and many more!
Part of the beauty of OSEM, I think, is it’s team of developers that form a community around the project, which is by itself a subset of the broader openSUSE community.

A little bit of info about my project

The project I will be working on this summer revolves around Tracks (you can think of tracks as collections of semantically related events). More specifically, in their current form the Conference Organizers create a set of tracks through the admin panel and the users select the track in which their event belongs, in their proposal. After that, the Conference Organizers review the proposals and schedule the events. By the end of GSoC, the plan is to modify tracks in order to allow the users to request new tracks that are self-organized (more one what that means later). Also, the user requested tracks will be constrained to a room and a set of dates. This way, a conference organizer will be able to create a call for tracks (like the call for papers), for users to submit track requests. Then, the requests will be processed by the conference organizers and a room and dates will be assigned to each self-organized track. Now, the Track Organizers (one of which is the user that submitted the request), will be the ones who are going to review the proposals for their track and schedule it’s events (hence, the self-organized part).
This new architecture could be utilized to, for example, model devrooms.

oSC17

We (the GSoC students of OSEM) were invited to join the rest of the community in the openSUSE Conference 2017. What I can say about it is that it was an amazing experience! There I met many interesting people, who had valuable experience and advices to share and with which we had a lot of fun. The conference was very educational with talks and workshops ranging from technical stuff like, packaging, tools and system management, to topics like, security, quality assurance, community management and organization.
We, also, had a meeting with the OSEM developers and mentors. It is a special moment when you, finally, meet face to face with a person, with whom you’ve been collaborating for some time.
Last but not least, we got the chance to visit the beautiful city of Nuremberg and had a tour at the SUSE offices.

Thanks

I want to thank the people at Google for (well) GSoC, Stella Rouzi for introducing me to the world of GSoC, the OSEM devs for their help and guidance and the openSUSE community for hosting such a great conference and sponsoring me through the TSP.