Update: More info about how to enter – what you have to do

Update: See the ideas page for suggestions of what you could work on.

Update – more prizes!!!

• Best use of Fedora 4: $250 USD Amazon Gift voucher
• ODIN will provide a prize of an iPad to the “best” project, as determined by a vote of the participating developers. The EC-funded ODIN project (http://odin-project.eu) builds on the ORCID and DataCite initiatives to uniquely identify researchers and data sets and connect this information across multiple services and infrastructures for scholarly communication. ODIN aims to address critical open questions including referencing data objects, tracking of data use and re-use, and linking between a data object, subsets, articles, rights statements and every person involved in its life-cycle.

What is it?

The developer challenge is a key part of the Open Repositories conference, targeted at software developers interacting with the OR community. We want to provide opportunities for growth for our software developers and show our support and appreciation by providing them with an event, the developer challenge, that is fulfilling for them and also valuable for the Open Repositories community.

The basic idea is:

• Teams work on the challenge problems to produce code that works, or nearly works, or failing that tell a good story, starting from Monday 9th June. NOTE: You don’t need to be a coder to take part! You can contribute your repository manager skills, documentation skills or presentation skills to a team.
• There’s a day before the conference to get a good start, if you’re not going to one of the workshops.
• We’ll host a match-making reception on Monday evening to help people find collaborators. This is open to developers and non-developers.
• You present your (preferably) working code on Wednesday, and the winners will be announced at the conference dinner.

The process

Once you have a team:

• make sure it is recorded on the entry list in the developer lounge by weds 10:00 am.

• Be ready to present on Weds 11 at 15:45 in Congress Hall

  Remember: We value “Entertaining live presentation of challenge projects in a relaxed setting over formal submissions”

  Also remember to look at the other dev challenge values

What is the challenge this year?

The overall challenge is to show the other conference attendees something new and exciting that enhances the richness of a repository ecosystem. We want you to:

Build or enhance a repository ecosystem, in line with the conference themes.

Come up with an idea, or, pick up one of the other ideas that someone has proposed and go for it!

How do I submit/find ideas?

The OR 2014 Dev Challenge will be “seeded” by the larger community via the submission of ideas, these might be general ‘big picture ideas’ or specific to a repository platform. We want to make it as easy as possible to propose an idea. You can:

• Tweet your idea with the hashtag #OR2014Idea
• Use the form on the Open Repositories 2014 website
• Email your idea to the Dev Challenge team through OR2014 mail box:

We have created a page to capture all the ideas. You can express interest in working on an idea by commenting on there.

Ideas FAQ

Q. I have an idea but I’m not a developer. Can I join in?

A. Propose it anyway. We’ll encourage developers to work on all the ideas. You can also be part of the team if you wish, helping with documentation and presenting the idea.

Q. I’m from one of the big open source projects and we want someone to work on my open source project – can I ask for that?

A. Yes, of course – you can propose any idea for a challenge entry that you like, but how about getting one of your senior developers to team up with a couple of new-starters and walk them through the challenge, possibly even joining the team.

Or, if you really want to encourage development on your platform, consider offering a prize!

The process, Where to go etc

These ideas will be presented to the OR community a few days before the event starts and then will be pitched to participants in more detail at the pre-conference Dev Challenge day (Monday) at Kaisa House.

Examples from the Access Hackfest event and previous OR Dev Challenges will provide some additional information on how this can work:

• Access 2011 hackfest
• Hackfest report
• OR2012 Developer Challenge

People who want to participate in the Dev Challenge but can’t attend the first day can still participate by joining an existing team, or coming to OR with their own Dev Challenge idea.

Why do we run this thing? and why should I join in?

The developer challenge has been running for several years, and the main benefits have been in developing our developers. The idea is to provide an environment in which repository developers can build their professional networks and acquire new skills. The values, aims and benefits are encapsulated in the dev-challenge manifesto:

Through this event we have come to value:

• Transparent, fun, open collaboration in diversely constituted teams over individual brilliance and/or groups of like individuals in cut-throat competition.
• The creation of new professional networks over the ossification of old ones. Effective engagement of non-developers (researchers, repository managers) in development over purely developer driven projects.
• Work done at the conference over presentation of something prepared earlier.
• Innovative ideas expressed in running code over wireframes, hand waving and elevator pitches.
• The development of the Open Repositories movement as a whole over siloed development on particular repository platforms.
• Entertaining live presentation of challenge projects in a relaxed setting over formal submissions.

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more in the context of the developer challenge at the Open Repositories conference.