[Inpycon] Registration system [was] Budget estimates

[Noufal Ibrahim]

I'm strongly -1 for the fossconf app. I don't mean to diss Kenneth or
the work he and Theju have done on it but I think it's more trouble
than it's worth.

It took approximately 40 days last year to get the app into a running
condition. This delayed our publicity efforts since we didn't have a
face on the web. The CSS issue was even worse since the person who
Sree assigned for it was unavailable and it got stretched out too
much.

The app crashed multiple times (for whatever reason) after it was
deployed and there were critical periods (like the day before the
conf.) when it was down and Kenneth was travelling. During the
scheduling, we had trouble with various things like slots (I'm not
sure about the specific issues but Ponnuswamy and Devyan who did that
had some trouble).

All we need on a site is a few informational pages (static HTML is
fine for this). Maybe a blog (we can either use static HTML or some
off the shelf blogging thing like wordpress - No, I'm not puritan
about Python). The registration/money collecting part we'll outsource
to doattend rather than waste time on getting it right. Software
projects have a way of expanding to suck up time and we don't have
that.

A 'poor' website doesn't make a poor conference. If there are people
who are willing to spend time on some nice designs, more power to them
and we can use those designs but I'm strongly in favour of throwing
together a few simple 2 column pages that outline the schedules etc.
and getting this out of the way. Not more than a day or two. Stock
designs are fine.

The success/lack thereof of the conference is decided by the talks and
human interactions during the actual two days of the event and not the
quality of the software running the website. Let's just get this out
of the way and move on with the meat of the project.



-- 
~noufal
http://nibrahim.net.in