Planning meeting notes for 2008-07-13

• Igal Koshevoy
• Ed Borasky

Event-related

• Commit to date with CubeSpace [Igal]
• Decide whether we want to call this “Cooking with Ruby” or “Ruby Cookoff” [All]
• Contact potential presenters and sponsors, see previous notes for listing and direct them at the http://pdxfoscon.org/ site for further information [All]
• Contact PDXPHP, Portland Pythoneers and Portland Django groups with competition guidelines, get their feedback [Igal]
• Build a sample app based on the requirements and revise them to make this can realistically be done in 20 minutes [Igal, anyone else?]
• Get Scott Wilson's text of Portland area organizations using Ruby [Anyone]

Site-related

• Create graphical banner for the site, e.g., large text “FOSCON 2008: Ruby Cookoff” and smaller text “Presented by the Portland Ruby Brigade” [Igal]
• Add Google Map to directions page, borrow it from Calagator http://calagator.org/events/1250455507 [Igal]
• Fix IE-only problems when rendering site [Igal]
• Add something to bottom of the pages so people don't feel cheated for scrolling down there and seeing nothing, maybe a picture of a Ruby [Igal]

• Skype and the Wiki worked well, they helped us collaborate easily despite not being in the same place.
• IRC (which no one joined) would have probably worked very poorly for doing complex discussions, editing text, etc. because it would have required ridiculous amounts of typing and hurt our productivity.
• Meeting at a location only makes sense if multiple people show up. Since no one else showed up at the physical meeting, I would have rather just worked from home.

We're really worried about whether we'll be able to pull this off given how little time is left and how much assistance is available. It'd really help if we could get more people to put in more hours into this. Screening presentations and working with sponsors will eat up a lot of time. Igal, Ed and Ian have have busy day jobs and other stuff to keep us busy. What to do?

We reviewed all text on the site and made the following major mprovements

• Tarted up the site, wish we had a graphics designer though
• Added “who” and “why” sections to the brief in the gray box at the top of the home page
• Removed the “about” section from the homepage because the brief now contains everything important in a much more skimmable format
• Wrote a “competition” page describing the event from the viewpoint of the audience and competitors, wrote up an initial set of application requirements
• Fixed header links so that they go to the right spot regardless of what page you're currently on
• Fixed pages so clicking into an anchor will bring it up at the top of the page by adding lots of whitespace.
• Added “Ruby culture” presentation for Calagator crew.
• Added links to presentation topics.