[Xesam] Proposal: Desktop Search hackfest

[Urho Konttori]

On Mon, 2008-07-21 at 18:07 +0300, Quim Gil wrote:
>> Proposal: Desktop Search Hackfest.
>> Calling to: Xesam, Beagle, Tracker projects and whoever else is involved.
>> When: September 19 + the days the developers decide before & after.
>> Where: Berlin.
>> Why: The Board made a call to organize hackfest around events and the
>> Maemo Summit has answered.
>> Budget: Funded by Nokia within reasonable terms.
>>
>> But why?
>>
>> Ok, let me explain. We have some budget to sponsor participants to
>> https://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2008 . We want to find a balance
>> between Maemo community contributors, related upstream developers and
>> core developers of the Maemo SW team at Nokia. We think organizing a
>> GNOME hackfest is a win-win.
>>
>> Desktop search is an interesting area. Federico explained in GUADEC
>> the problems of Oralia finding her stuff and there are many more
>> things unsolved. It is becoming a critical area, considering that
>> users are getting more volumes of data, more types of files and they
>> have them spread through several devices and the Internet.
>>     
>
> Its a good idea and I know the tracker devs including myself will want
> to attend
>
> I would prefer it if it was Desktop search and *Metadata* as the search
> aspect is already well covered in Xesam but the use of a centralised
> metadata is critical to having a well integrated desktop.
>   
I couldn't agree more that we should also emphasize the metadata aspect 
for the gnome hackfest. It would be a good time for us to draft the 
initial metadata api at the hackfest / summit as part of the missions.

For the xesam, I would also really like that we put on the agenda the 
support for other RPC mechanisms than DBUS, with http being on top of my 
list at the moment. This will suit very well to even more cross-platform 
xesam and should make it very nice to develop web runtime -alike 
applications on different platforms.

This is a very good opportunity for xesam, beagle, strigi, tracker, 
pinot and recoil developers to meet, but also to meet application 
developers for the metadata use cases.

I don't think we'd need more than 2 days for our hackfest / workshop. 
Maemo summit is on 19-20 and we could start on those dates or 
immediately after. I suggest immediately after, as Jos van den Oever is 
not able to attend on the 20th. So, we can hold the fest in Berlin on 
21-22 September. Nokia could be sponsoring the travels and hotels for 
those participants who cannot arrange sponsorships from other companies. 
As Quim Gil said, we'd need a rough count to see how many we can sponsor.

As far as I know, the following people are interested in attending the 
hackfest:
Jos van den Oever (Strigi)
Jamie McCracken (Tracker)
Sebastian Trueg (Nepomuk) (Jos recomended - hasn't confirmed)
Kevin Ottens (KDE Plasma search) (Jos recomended - hasn't confirmed)
Martyn Russel (Tracker)
Carlos Garnacho (Tracker)
Philip van Hoof (Tracker)
Urho Konttori (Tracker)
Ivan Frade (Tracker)
Mikael Ottela (Tracker)

We started the discussion on the Tracker domain, so Tracker is still a 
bit over emphasized on the list.  We are missing any beagle, pinot and 
recoil developers as well as Mikkel and Evgeny. And - of course - all of 
the application developers that use metadata/search engines would be 
more than welcome.

We now need a place to form up the agenda - all ideas are welcome. I 
suggest that we set a wiki page to draft the mission, agenda and the 
participants list on the Xesam wiki on 
http://www.xesam.org/main/summit/September2008.

Please, confirm your interest and let us know whether you would need 
sponsorship to attend to the summit in Berlin.

Kind regards,
Urho Konttori