Okay, so next we have Johan van de Waal speaking on switching the FOSDEM conference management
system to pre-talks.
It's already time?
It's not too early?
Okay.
Wow, thank you.
Hello, everyone.
I'm going to talk about, well, maybe not such a technical issue, but I'm going to talk about
how we migrated from PENTABARV, which is a logo on the left, to pre-talks as our conference
management system.
So very short thing about me.
I do scientific programming.
I developed together with my friend over there, fiber-based monitoring solutions.
And apart from that, I've been in FOSDEM team for quite some time.
I visited for the first time in 2007.
I did some research for this presentation.
And I've managed the geospatial dev room, and since a few years I've been coordinating
the dev rooms, and I'm part of the server team of FOSDEM.
I am not a web developer, and I'm also not good at slides, as you can see.
It's important to know.
So what is pre-talks?
Oh, no.
What is PENTABARV?
And what is pre-talks?
What do we use it for?
PENTABARV and pre-talks are the tools that we use where people will submit their talk,
where dev room managers or we or staff will choose our talks, we will review, we will
build a schedule, and then finally we will publish it on the website using that tool.
This is the tool we used, which was called PENTABARV.
This is the new tool pre-talks, which we use this year for the first time.
Why did we switch?
Anyone here, who of you has actually submitted a talk this year?
Okay.
Who are the dev room managers in the room?
Well, okay, at least one.
Yeah, most of them are in their dev room, of course.
So I would love to get some feedback from them.
So what was the main issue with PENTABARV before?
The main issue with PENTABARV is that it's Ruby on Rails.
I tried to get it running on my computer for a few years because we wanted to improve it,
but it didn't work.
I couldn't get it working.
Actually my next slide is maybe more interesting.
This is a screenshot I made.
So this was a state of pre-talks.
This is their master repository.
So you can see it has been abandoned for quite some time.
We made a fork with a nice name Postgres9, which gives you an ID about when it happens.
And you can see we did some updates, but not too much.
You would get people making pull requests like this.
So yeah, I could not install it.
So in the web archive, I found install instructions, and they wanted to add that.
I also found those install instructions, and we had some in our internal wiki, but without
that, even with those, I could not get it running.
That's why at some point I said no, I will not improve PENTABARV.
I went to improve another project, which is still in use for other conferences.
So I had a look at pre-talks.
Pre-talks is a Django application.
And when I tried it, I was struggling with that for a very, very long time.
And at the end of the evening, I said, well, let's try the other one.
So I just did this Docker compose stuff, and I had this thing running, and I could import
a schedule which was generated before.
And I almost had something that looked like a full conference system for FOSM ready, maybe
after one hour.
So I was quite happy with that.
Yeah.
So I was not the first one who had planned to move from pre-talks, because what are actually
the issues with PENTABARV?
The main issue was nobody could install it.
It was still running, but we didn't know for how long.
And if some strange bug would occur, I'm not sure anyone in our team would be really capable.
Well, if there's really a bad bug, people will start to become a bit better, and they
might fix it, but it was unmaintained for such a long time.
So there have been many plans to move, but they usually failed because then they said,
well, we need to have that feature, and that feature, and that feature, and that feature.
And the other thing is nobody works on FOSM until, let's say, September.
In September, we do a kickoff, then we open the call for dev rooms, and then it's like,
okay, yeah, we're too late.
It's not yet ready.
We cannot use it.
And then the next year, nobody will work on FOSM until September when, again, they kick
in, and it's not ready.
There's also some resistance to change.
People will say, it works for us, so we don't need to change it.
That's part of the...
This is mostly the internal people.
This is not the people submitting.
We had people, kernel developers, sending videos of trying to login and do PentaBARF
without it working.
So I think that's quite a bad state.
So in order to avoid those things, there are a few things I wanted to have before the kickoff
that we have in September.
And for me, there's were two things.
It was building a website.
It should be possible from PTOX.
And the second thing is having an audit log.
What is an audit log?
This is an example from PentaBARF.
It is everything which is entered into the system.
It's actually interesting that somebody gave feedback on a talk of a year ago, but it was
the last thing I could find.
But it shows the difference everywhere in the system.
And this is really useful because we have had these discussions.
This year, some deaf room manager approved a talk in another deaf room.
And then, yeah, that's a bit...
It's not nice because the speaker, he books a stick and he thinks he can go.
And then, oh, that was a mistake.
We fixed that, by the way, so they can no longer approve each other's talks, but in the beginning
it was possible.
We had a presentation where they completely changed the scope after it was approved.
It was also not very nice.
And then you can always go back and see what was history.
I actually would really recommend people if they do something.
Use such a log even for normal database, but definitely for a conference management system,
it makes sense.
So this was one of the two things I wanted to have ready by September.
It didn't have to look nice.
This on the left is very useful.
This on the right, well, you can do those things if you need them, but you will not
get happy from it.
But at least we had a way to find out if strange things happened, how they were happened.
It was also a template for both changes, or if we changed some configuration, then at
least we could trace back what was history.
The second big thing which we needed, which I said, was to be able to build a website.
Why?
Because our website is used by all of our other integrations, or most of them, which
include Matrix S review, which is what people use to review their videos, and all the scheduling
applications that you have on your phone.
So that was also one of the things which had to be ready, at least in some form, before
we could switch.
Yeah, I forgot.
Oh yes, now I know again.
A third thing which I did, but this actually only started after this initial session.
This was during the actual organization of the event.
I created a plugin for pre-talks, which has some specific settings for FOSDM.
For example, people, they will pull out a call for papers on the website.
They could enter it here.
Well actually, all of them, they send it by mail before I had the system ready, but at
least next year they will be able to do it.
It's a bit similar for most of the other boxes which are there.
So they can close their call for papers, so people can stop submitting to their track,
because some tracks like to keep it open for a longer time, but then at least they get
a URL where they can still submit.
So if you're really quick, you can get that code and submit to the main track, but I don't
think anyone will accept it.
During the event, this is actually something I actually fixed this morning.
Dev room manager will find some instructions.
I hope that this will grow a bit over the next year, so that they have only one place
to look while doing their team.
Yeah, so I wrote here most of the things were already a bit late, but it was also only the
way during the conference that it was like enough vibe to add those things, to build them,
to realize that we needed them, because if you just click around in the interface, it
all looks fine, but it's only when you start using it that you notice that you need some
extra tools, unless you're really good at testing.
I'm not.
We had to make some changes to pre-talks itself, mostly to limit Devroom managers to edit other
people's things.
I made some changes to the review system.
As I said before, sometimes it is too late.
This was something I didn't understand that no one of them complained, because if they
did reviews and they clicked next review, they would get a random track from another
thing.
That doesn't really make sense, so I changed it.
It would always stay in the same track.
So what are submissions?
This was by default not enabled, but we have some people who submit a lot of talks.
One person submitted 15 talks for this Boston.
So if all of those are in different tracks, all of these Devroom managers, they would
spend time in looking at the same proposal again.
Well, now if they see the list, then at least they know, okay, he is already there.
Let's keep him.
The last things we've had to change, which are a bit complicated and where I'm maybe
not completely happy about the workflow, is the fact that we have parallel scheduling.
So pre-talks in itself, it's actually made for, you have a large group of reviewers,
and then you have a small group of people who actually built a schedule, which works
for most conferences, but which doesn't work for FOSM, because we have a lot of people
scheduling.
So well, that's actually the nice side.
Some of the last things which I want to mention, these are like the annoyances of at least
some of the people, mostly from the staff.
Pre-talks is much less information dense.
If you look just even to the resolution, you see that here, all information is a bit spread
out over the screen, while here it's very close to each other.
You have a search book.
If you start typing here, you will get to any talk.
Here you would go to proposals, then click on talks, then type in the checkbooks, then
search.
It will take you much more time.
So this is one of the annoyances we had this year, which we hope to improve for next year.
Things that we had over Penta, so these are things which already went better this year,
even though it was like a migration year.
There were much more reviews, so that was, we could reach a larger group, I think, because
it was easier to use, or maybe because we promoted a bit more.
Devroom managers, they can now send mails.
Before they had to export all the email addresses, then run it through their own mail program
and then send mails.
While here they are in the system, if you would go back as a speaker, you can click
open those things and find your mails by yourself.
So finally, I have only three minutes left.
What are the roadmap?
What are the IDs?
First of all, the audit log, which I showed you, it's a bit integrated.
Well, actually, the code is quite separate, but as soon as pre-talks makes another release,
I want to make it a separate plugin, which can be installed completely apart from Falsum,
because I think it's interesting for all pre-talks users who choose Postgres, they just should
use it.
It will always help you.
And then the next part is actually a bit going back to what I told earlier, Pentabar
which was so hard to install.
I don't want to create a new plugin which is as hard to install as pre-talks.
Well, nowadays it's a bit hard.
We have a demo site, which is that one, pre-talks test.
So I actually want to make that into something that you can install with.
It will not be one click, but it will be quite easy to install.
So people who want to improve it, that they at least can do.
Yes.
Then the other thing is we made some custom changes.
I hope to get rid of them, integrate either them into pre-talks or make sure that there
are signals which are like places in the interface where we change something, but that it's already
ready for it so that we can put it into the plugin instead of in the code itself which
is forked.
The last thing is we want to get more information about previous year submissions because it's
interesting especially for main track speakers to see has this person presented before, how
was the feedback?
Maybe he gave the same presentation already, then we will skip him, those kind of things.
Finally, my last slide.
You can help.
Well, an obvious way is to help upstream with the project.
Pre-talks is used by a lot of other conferences.
I believe they have about 100 conferences or something like that organized every year with
pre-talks.
Maybe much more than, sorry for it.
We have our own repos, but especially the first one is useful.
That's a pre-talks integration because that's the place where we really do the bug tracker.
I put some questions there and I intend to put a few more also with questions for you.
Then especially I mean you are the users like the dev room managers.
Which settings do you want to have for reviews?
Do you want to score from 0 to 10 or from 0 to 100 or in different categories?
I just made a random choice and you should get some feedback.
Then there are the two forked repos which are actually only useful in combination with
the other one.
I just give them for completeness.
That's my talk.