From espians

Contents 1 The Team Of Total Awesomenesses Daily Shaila, The First 1.1 Shaila Meta-Stuff 1.2 The Meeting 1.2.1 [Business Contracts] 1.2.2 [Business Structure] 1.2.3 [Business Accounting] 1.2.4 [Development Timeline] 1.2.5 [Development Tasks] 1.2.6 [Development Team Members] 1.2.7 [Protoplex/Kalati] 1.2.8 [VOIP] 1.2.9 [Licensing] 1.2.10 [Subversion] 1.2.11 [LOCALIZATION] 1.2.12 [Transparency] 1.2.13 [3ware] 1.2.14 [butterfly.tv] 1.2.15 [Development Summary] 1.2.16 [World Cup] 1.2.17 [Other] 1.3 TTLY

The Team Of Total Awesomenesses Daily Shaila, The First

Info: See <http://openideaproject.org/irclogs/browse/esp-core/2006/06/14> for introductory docs.

Author: Jeffry Archambeault (jeffarch) <jjarchambeault@gmail.com>

Date: $Date: 2006-06-15 21:30:00 +0100 (Thu, 15 Jun 2006) $

Revision: $Revision: 0001 $

Description: Summary of Initial Development Meeting

Shaila Meta-Stuff

There was much content in the #esp-core irc log for the meeting last night. Since tav already wrote up a nice devplan (url below), some thought has to be put into the structure and content of this document.

Groups were made of the main speaking points, this provides tags that could be used with an ircbot.  Those tags will be used here,  as well as in daily updates.  ReStructured Text will be used for markup.
 

The Meeting

Tav's  _devplan: http://www.espians.com/espra/devplan.html document covers the details.

[Business Contracts]

- June 27th is the deadline for development to be complete and production instances ready for clients.
- clients include adidas (signed), 21west, telephony japan, guardian (about to be signed), united nations, unicef, buckingham university (late stage negotiations)
- tav yeah, adidas was signed as largeblue given that we needed the cash in quick -- the rest will be signed as butterfly.tv -- thus why we're working up the funky contracts
- kpi can we see the contract with adidas pls?
- thruflo nope!

(leads to...)

[Business Structure]

- formation of butterfly.tv, jointly owned by esp metanational llp and largeblue ltd.  - It will be providing affordable broadband and mobile television services - the success of green.tv showed that such things were in demand and would provide funding for initial development.
- tav share structure of butterfly.tv:
- tav * 35% esp
- tav * 35% largeblue
- tav * 10% ade
- tav * 10% thruflo
- tav * 10% tav
- tav </share-structure>
- kpi is the <share-structure> written down somewhere and signed by those who administer the money?
- tav kpi: we're be doing that as part of the grand incorporation process going on

[Business Accounting]

- kpi tav: define "we've got 90,000" pls
- tav kpi: money will be in our bank by the very end of july
- thruflo working at moment with 'heads of agreement'
- kpi so: first: work. then: money?
- tav we've already signed adidas, and once we get the final contracts from our (expensive!!) media lawyers, are able to immediately sign the others mentioned earlier
- tav basically, 6-week development period -- and money for it at the end of it
- tav for core components of protoplex/kalati
- tav yeah, adidas was signed as largeblue given that we needed the cash in quick -- the rest will be signed as butterfly.tv -- thus why we're working up the funky contracts
- tav kpi: basically, come end july, we have the money in the bank
- £90,000 of the funds received from signed clients will be used for the intense development period. 

[Development Timeline]

- tav so, draft timeline:
- tav * 15th june -- development starts
- tav * 14th july -- production servers start getting setup
- tav * 17th july -- testing and user interface integration begins 
- tav * 27th july -- production instances are ready for clients
- tav * 28th july -- oceans of booze ;p
- Omni|Work but hopefully no boos.
- kpi so: first: work. then: money?
- tav basically, 6-week development period -- and money for it at the end of it for core components of protoplex/kalati
- Not mentioned was the issue of schedule slippage 
- Let's keep that a moot point

[Development Tasks]

- thruflo http://www.largeblue.com/space/first_run_through.txt
- tav does that text file make much sense?
- tav 1.1 abstracting out the work done so far and making it easy to deploy across new servers
- tav 1.2 the automated encoding i spoke about 

- talonlzr

- tav 1.3 expanding the support for our multi-plugin/multi-platform player
- tav 2.1/a increasing the capabilities of our OMI (object management interface -- tagging, relations, &c.)
- tav 2.1/b having the capacity to do rapid mockups and do easy composing of new user interfaces to the same services

- nads

- tav 2.2/a community-oriented tools
- tav 2.2/b general integration (mail, sms, ical, &c.)
- tav 2.2/c accounting systems, customer relationship management, task/resource management, &c. -- simple but effective tools
- tav 3.1/a dynamic server setup -- so we can have a quick way of setting up new instances

- evangineer & GReaper

- tav 3.2/a client portal -- management -- real time stats
- tav 3.2/b integration into clients' workflows, e.g. with final cut pro, &c.

Some clarification of the overall product:

- nads are we developing tailored solutions for the clients or a general version of butterfly.tv which then can be applied?
- nads meaning are we working on one product or on many
- thruflo nads: we're developing an abstracted system that we can sell out of the box
- thruflo where there's customization / specific implementation work the idea is to deal with on a case by case basis
- nads aha
- thruflo equally though, plan to continually improve the platform in response to / thanks to work done for individual clients
- thruflo and 'force upgrade' clients on a rolling release
- kpi thruflo: so i understand the project management strategy is going from client to client
- kpi then next is butterfly.tv or adidas?
- thruflo um
- thruflo the plan is pretty clear now
- thruflo we've been working to built client base
- kpi with green.tv as an example i suppose?
- thruflo now have basis to move properly
- thruflo and compete with feedroom / narrowstep et al
- * evangineer adds brightcove to the list of et all
- * thruflo adds butterfly

[Development Team Members]

- tav note: generally i'm hoping for everyone to be involved with the overall conceptual and technical development of this product
- tav it paves the way for the collaborative media platform that we'll be developing for espra -- hopefully straight after
- tav so cool
- tav which aspects are people interested in?
- tav nads -- for our wonderful slick designs
- nads jupp ... and general konceptional komments
- tav nads: cool *smootchkiss*
- tav jeffarch -- community manager and productions
- tav thruflo-- production (feeding in from clients in particular, documentation, flash, ui)
- tav keyjaque -- javascript, ui
- tav talonlzr -- hard-core backend (automatic encoder, &c.)
- tav possumman: can i put you down for general python hacking ?
- possumman sure, tha'd be great!
- tav possumman: cool, thanks!
- tav GReaper+evangineer: dynamic server system ?
- evangineer yep, might do some fiddling with community tools stuff as well
- tav __igor__: are you up for the python hacking too ?
- * __igor__ might do well-defined tasks
- tav __igor__: cool
- tav jhb: would you be up for a general specific tasks thing like 
- jhb tav: yes, task oriented sounds good
- tav so, t -- are you up for working on say the voip integration and the user interface aspects ?
- t to tav question on qorking on the userinterface. i would help by conception and documentation of the userinterface (how to use).
- t i also would help at some JS related stuff. but i am more intrested having a good js-structure in kalati.
- tav cool, deltab is also interested in that
- tav right, sbp and i will be co-leading this development effort
- jhb tav: who has the final say: you or sbp?
- tav whilst staying on in the role of architect, i want to phase myself out of development so that i can focus on the business development aspects
- tav as benevolent dictator of esp, i guess i have the fundamental final say -- but don't see many cases where that would be an issue ;p

[Protoplex/Kalati]

Much discussion took place regarding the codebase.

- tav right, the codebase for green.tv is running on protoplex
- tav we have 2 different code bases right now -- neither yet open source -- but both committed to open source
- tav 1. protoplex -- a quick hack which uses existing projects and works
- tav 2. kalati -- a more perfectionist implementation of the plexnet (protoplex only really implements the indexes and a bit of the services)
- kpi sbp: i would really like to hear your opinion on the current status of protoplex code.
- sbp kpi: I haven't seen the protoplex code since mid last year when I took a day or two installing it with, I believe, derT on #esp
- tav sbp: that's now become "kalati" and protoplex is a separate code base altogether ;p
- sbp reads tav's conflicting description of protoplex vs. kalati, updates his knowledge of that from the rather outdated 2004 view :-)
- sbp evangineer: kalati is the application layer sitting on top of the plex, so protoplex is the actual codebase and kalati is presumably more of the interface. a bit like, I suppose, redland (protoplex) is an RDF (kalati) API
- tav sbp: hmz, sorry love -- terms have changed. kalati is ehm our implementation of plexnet. kalati -> plexnet. apache -> http.
- tav protoplex is another "quick hack" implementation -- which only does indexes and a bit of services
- tav kalati being the perfectionist version

- Omni|Work I can see it from the outside, but don't really know how it works on the inside.
- thruflo  _omi: http://www.green.tv/!omi helpful?
- tav note: that url thruflo pasted is live... so ehm, don't make changes pls ;p
- Omni|Work thruflo: That gives me a much better idea of what's going on on the - inside, yes.
- thruflo cool!

That developed into a discussion about bootstrapping from protoplex to kalati.

- tav a bootstrap-off-of-trac-or-someother
- possumman In six weeks, don't we pretty much only have time to finish the clients' promised features?
- tav possumman: hmz, depends how productive we are ;p
- * kpi suggests more focus on the application = butterfly.tv

- evangineer bootstrap using trac plugins?
- tav evangineer: good idea
- possumman evangineer: could you explain that a bit more?
- evangineer trac supports plugins
- evangineer you can write your own extensions/enhancements for trac
- possumman So what's an example of what we might be bootstrapping with trac plugins?
- evangineer possumman, for example a plugin could be using to allocate pecus/community currency to each task
- possumman Ah.  Thanks
- possumman I guess examples of trac  bootstraps is perhaps a question for tav.
- Omni|Work I'm wondering if perhaps part of a Trac bootstrap might be getting the trac bug system to point at some sort of bug object in Plex.  Or maybe making it automatically pull in Plex discussions.
- possumman I've done some trac plugin programming before, by the way, and am ready to start right away, although I will have to multitask a bit with some other  projects.
- * evangineer considers the merit of Omni|Work's idea about connecting Trac and Plex and finds it good
- evangineer great idea!
- * possumman would love to work on trac / plex crossover software :o)
- * __igor__ agrees
- kpi do we need to have trac plugins for having a working application for our clients?
- tav kpi: well, the community tools are a key component of what we need for butterfly.tv
- tav evangineer: one thing is that we really need a good events system for the applications that we are creating, e.g. the 2 way live chat
- tav that's not available in protoplex, only becomes available once we have disco
- tav but agreed about depriotising the kalati work
- tav perhaps i should do that in the background ;p
- tav and let everyone else get on with the real work (tm)
- tav i think if we have a parallel track that basically focuses on finishing off disco (distributed concurrency) events system, pod (plexnet object database) and web server running on disco
- tav we should then be able to swap out zodb and cherrypy
- tav and gradually migrate the protoplex packages to take advantage of disco
- evangineer the issue is whether or not we can do it within the six week timescale with the available resources and still deliver the promised client functionality.
- possumman what about using protoplex for our current practical code, but also having a kalati / protoxplex compatibility project in the works.
- tav that could work -- how do you see that working ?
- * evangineer suggests leaving kalati stuff until we have satisfied, paying clients
- nads wise
- * jhb nods
- * kpi has seen protoplex and believes there still is much to do there.
- possumman tav: Well, it turns out you were saying pretty much the same thing, and I just wasn't reading the logs very well.   I'm sure you have a better idea than me how to do this, since you understand the codebase, but surely we should be able to build a kalati plugin or something that lets kalati gradually take  over the base.
- possumman Maybe there's a way to do the kaliti to protoplex or protoplex to kalati in such a way that the features are in demand as we build them.  
- tav possumman: *nod*
- possumman evangineer: agreed.  I think we should do very little kaliti / protoplex integration over the next 6 weeks.  But probably a little more than none.  We should at least think about how to migrate one to the other.
- possumman tav, perhaps some of us who are interested can work on kaliti / protoplex conversion in the background with you (without pay, since no one's giving us money for that task).
- tav possumman: that would be v.cool!

- evangineer so what codebase is being used for the next 6 weeks, protoplex or kalati?
- tav thanks evangineer for that wonderfully hard question ;p
- tav current thoughts are to start on protoplex and to port kalati over to it or vice versa
- tav would that make sense ?
- possumman wouldn't protoplex be more practical over the next 6 weeks, since it exists?
- possumman (than kalati)
- evangineer makes sense to me
- tav well, yeah, but the poor kalati baby never gets any loving
- tav it's been neglected for almost a year now *sob*
- nads sounds like it makes things more complicated than necessary though
- tav okay okay ;p
- tav protoplex it is 

- nads i don't understand a word but I'm glad disco is involved
- tav nads: disco allows you to create funkier interfaces -- remember the service composer you designed? it'll be possible

Summary: Build upon protoplex, use plugins to trak where needed, add kalati functions if they materialize from parallel (non-priority) development.  Event system for live chat - see what happens?

[VOIP]

 We're already seeing aspects of product development starting to fit together.

- t i am a lot more intrested in this (voip) but i dont see the need in the butterfly.tv please examine ...
- tav and to tie that in with a customer relationship management system
- t  sales/account management team ? 
- tav t: the people who go out and deal with the clients
- tav t: well, the sales/account management team needs to have calls automatically redirected to them based on availability
- t ok so its a infrastructure and backend task ... right?
- tav aye
- t yes i can do that. 

And that lead to general collaborative tools

- t sbp: what about using voip and phone structure for development crew?
- sbp t: not sure if we'll all be around at the same time enough for that, and also I'm not so good with phone communication. I think it'd be great if people got together as much as possible as they could on the phone when it's needed, though, even if it was just two or three people hashing out something
- sbp and when I say phone I mean mainly Skype, Google Talk, or whatever
- sbp stuff like Gobby and Email and Wikis are good too. whatever works best for people
- * evangineer notes that Gobby doesn't seem to support outlining
- * evangineer points thruflo to sbp's mention of Gobby and other collab type stuff.
- t sbp: when i talk about phone i mean what u mean but also these old thingies with dialtonekeys and maybe u heard of this new mobile devices? :)
- thruflo right
- t what was the point with _this: http://telephony.co.jp/
- * jeffarch finds the voip clue he was digging thru the logs for...  _peerio: http://www.peerio.com/aboutpeerio.php
- jeffarch friend of thruflo
- * kpi feels a bit left behind ...
- nads t: possible client
- thruflo well, definite client
- * kpi is now known as kpi
- nads äh ... person or company giving money for goods or services
- sbp interesting; hover the text and some Japanese comes up. hard to know whether it's a translation or an extra message though. not least because the English text is in a terribly unreadable font
- nads i might be wrong
- t also a setup with voicemail (receive messages via mail/jabber) and conferencing.
- t last week i moved into a new officeplace. called bootlab berlin
- t there i am working together with igor. and beside us 2 guys called telekommunisten
- t they deal with hosted pbx.
- t i will asked them to get a esp pbx system then can everyone get a extension on that. redirect to his "phone".
- jeffarch I'd pondered setting up asterisk with recorded conference rooms, on qin

[Licensing]

- tav basically, i'd like to ensure that we can resource the full development of kalati
- possumman nads, I'm just saying, I want to eventually release my code, regardless of what happens to esp.
- tav possumman: hmz, good idea
- tav possumman: does october 2007 seem good to you?
- possumman Yes, I'll be happy if I know I can release my code by then.
- tav possumman: cool. is that good with everyone?

[Subversion]

 Much discussed, as immediate development depends on it.  After some debate of suitable linux distros, getting subversion installed on the existing platform took priority.

- evangineer Let's exhaust our options with the current distro and/or server before considering switching to something else
- sbp like, OMFG LET'S GET ON WITH IT, sort of thing :-)

[LOCALIZATION]

- thruflo one of the key things that will hopefully set our product out from the crowd is localization
- thruflo led both by possible work with the whole UN family producing worldstories.tv
- thruflo and by partnership with telephony.co.jp
- thruflo who are interested in helping resource development not just of localized interface
- thruflo but of a wider 'community localization' system
- thruflo possibly also incorporating dotsub's interface if that helps
- thruflo the idea being to allow users to transcribe films and re-encode injecting subtitles from their submissions to make videos accessible in different languages
- * evangineer wonders if annodex fits into the mix somewhere
- * evangineer wonders at the lack of greenbot and xena
- * evangineer just wonders full stop! ;-)
- thruflo evangineer: agree re: annodex, eg: xml format to output user input from dotsub into something we can pass into encoder
- * evangineer not familiar with dotsub
- * evangineer googles
- evangineer _dotstub: http://www.dotsub.com/how/index.php
- talonlzr btw, is there any reason why we can't solve subtitling with DOM+JS?
 - thruflo sorry - dotsub came across green.tv, they're interested in integrating their (flash based) web tool with the green.tv platform - the idea being that it's a good interface f for entering timecoded transcriptions
- thruflo they may not be useful tho
- * evangineer wonders about dotsub's T&Cs
- evangineer SMIL?
- thruflo dom / js possibly  = multi plugin hell
- * tav shudders from smil ;p
- thruflo smil only qt?
- tav aye

[Transparency]

- t jeffarch: can u make a summary of the logfile today?
- jeffarch t: ok
- t cool where will i find it? (esp-mailinglist,wiki,blog?)
- jeffarch sbp: indeed a bummer
- jeffarch t: oh, you want a location now? ;)
- t no but when it is there i wanna know where to look.
- jeffarch I'll send it out in the mailinglist
- sbp the Top Secret Mailing List of Secrecy
- jeffarch Top Secret Translucency ;)
- t hmm "Top Secret Mailing List of Secrecy" @ google = no hits :)

 The back-story is that a new entity as appeared in #esp, illegale, questioning the private nature of the espian googlegroup.  

- tav jeffarch: hmz, please don't put summaries publically 
- tav i'm on a wipe esp off of the face of the internet mission 
- tav in order to come back in full vigour you understand 
- tav summaries onto trac ? 
- tav + list ?

[3ware]

- thruflo talonlzr: got the mail, tx - I'll query hetzner re: 3ware setup?
- talonlzr [23:12] <thruflo> talonlzr: got the mail, tx - I'll query hetzner re: 3ware setup? <-- sure, get a quote, but its probably not worth it, $<>Performance
- * evangineer points out that he should probably be in the loop on stuff like 3ware if only so he knows what's going on.
- thruflo talonlzr: so 3ware notwithstanding, do you need a windows server now-ish - what's the timescale to set something up?

[butterfly.tv]

- kpi thruflo: http://butterfly.tv shows me a wedding?
- possumman How romantic :-)
- kpi :)
- thruflo i suspect they're the people we're negotiating with but yup should have got it by now...
- sbp yo tav. what's up with the butterfly.tv domain?
- sbp it looks like it's for sale rather than bought?
- tav sbp: we've negotiated them down to $1,200 for 2 years and are in the process of purchasing it
- sbp neato

[Development Summary]

- tav so, sbp 
- tav what's the best way of trashing out a detailed plan ? 
- sbp heh. funny switching context from discussing the political affiliations of polar bears to this 
- sbp I'd like to be able to look at what code exists first, really 
- sbp before planning anything 
 - sbp and making sure that there is a server that works, and that people have access to it and its svn/trac facilities 
- sbp that is basically a good enough detailed plan to keep us occupied until we can make the Real Detailed Plan, I think :-) 
- sbp especially since then we can decide where we're going to do the planning 
- tav k 
- sbp we have quite a few choices: IRC, email, wiki, Gobby, trac, etc. 
- sbp need to make sure people are maximally comfortable 
- sbp and excited about it. nothing happens unless people are excited about what they're doing
- sbp so, I'm assuming that for the morph it's basically business as usual 
- sbp in otherwords, that butterfly is the next evolutionary stage in the development of the green.tv codebase, but that green.tv runs off of protoplex and butterfly will run off of kalati? 
- sbp but I'm assuming quite a lot in there 
- sbp 1) does green.tv really run off of protoplex? or does it run off of the nascent kalati? or something else? 
- sbp 2) how far removed from green.tv will butterfly be? 
- tav sbp: green.tv is only protoplex 
- tav protoplex uses some bits of code from kalati 
- tav sbp: i'm hoping that we can effectively merge the 2 over the course of the period 
- tav so that front end wise, green.tv functionality still carries over 
- tav but, backend wise we're taking advantage of the likes of kalati events system

[World Cup]

Luckily, the merits of doing intense development during the World Cup was not discussed.

- nads gemany just made a goal apparently
- nads judging from the noice around here
- kpi nads: yes. in the 91st minute!
- kpi 1:0 for germany against poland (for those not watching ...)
- tav moving on from football... ;p
- * evangineer tries not be distracted by world cup stuff
- * kpi tried but gave up yesterday ..
- tav evangineer: ditto

[Other]

tav confirmed (evangineer, igor, jeffarch, jhb, possumman, sbp, Omni, nads, t, talonlzr, tav, thruflo) pseudo confirmed (GReaper, Killarny)

Protoplex/Kalati and Subversion threads morphed into a discussion about suitable linux distros for servers.  A moot point for development, as we need to get svn/trac on-line ASAP, but will probably come into play wrt

- tav we need to have a strategy for deploying new xen instances via script for new client "nodes" (instances)
-  sbp got phenny into #esp-core to help with communications
- sbp has changed the topic to: Welcome. This is home to The Team Of Total Awesomenesses
- sbp bwahaha: "The voweles of the Englysshe tonge weren supposed to shifte yn 1377. But KYNG RICHARDE tolde them to staye the helle where they were." - from a t-shirt

jhb will need to have an hourly rate / price per task set and an idea with whom the written contract will be

- tav woo! /me adds GReaper to the confirmed team
- sbp no tav
- sbp not "the team"
- sbp The Team Of Total Awesomenesses
- tav sbp, heh

TTLY

- The Logs, Last Year - just for fun

jeffarch picks brother up at airport for the long drive, gets ready to move from Austin TX to his current location.

jhb and derT are sitting in Berlin doing some xtreme programming

<oierw> hmm. I see the 'release early, release often' mantra has fallen on it's face.

<urgyen> someone smashed a window in my van and tried to get the stereo this morning

qopi changes topic to "Protoplex: http://p-pack.de:8080/kollab/code/trunk-2005-05-19.tar.bz2 Install: http://www.openideaproject.org/Projects/OIPeople/KollabSetup || Logos:  || - <urgyen> espia: the land that results from the impact of networking?"