News from the SF East Bay Laconica Hackfest

Last Saturday, Laconica enthusiasts from all over the San Francisco Bay Area (as well as a couple from as far away as Montréal and Portland) got together at Berkeley Coworking to add new features to Laconica, fix bugs, network, and generally have a good time.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 people turned out during the course of the event, not including those who participated online via the Laconica IRC channel. Some people came by to learn more about Laconica, some came to get help with installation, and some worked on related projects. Some showed up just to chat. It was a nice mix of folks.

We started out with a fairly large list of potential projects to work on, but after some discussion, and a little urging from @dave, several people decided to work on making Laconica easier to install, and the hackfest ended up focused on tasks related to that.

Some things we accomplished:

• @evan built an easy to use web-based installer for Laconica, similar to the Wordpress installer.
• @ksedgwic created a nice Fedora RPM, with requisite .spec file that can live in the source tree and be used to make further RPMs.
• @ksedgwic with help from the Berkeley Coworking gang (Paul and Dave) also built an Amazon EC2 machine image for Laconica based on Fedora 8, using the new RPM (AMI ID: ami-27d3344e). Anyone can spin the image up, and with some minimal configuration, have a running instance of Laconica. (Note: it's still at the "proof of concept" stage and needs some fit and finish work.) Hopefully, we can integrate the web-based installer and make it even easier to get up and running.
• @pheobe, along with other online participants, made a great start on a new user documentation wiki for Laconica and Identi.ca.

Additionally, we made some progress on designing the UI for the upcoming OAuth support in Laconica's API, and some other fun projects materialized.

The hackfest turned out to be a big success, and it seems like that we should do more events like this in the future, perhaps in more than one city simultaneously.