[OH-Dev] New, mini "tasks" app

[Asheesh Laroia]

Howdy all,

I've been semi-stealthily working on a new OpenHatchy bit of web code, and 
I thought now (well, the past) would be a good time to say what I've been 
up to, explain why, and request help. (-:

You can see it in action at 
http://linode.openhatch.org/~paulproteus/tmp/tasks/

Keegan McAllister helped out a bunch with the app for the most recent 
event, at Wellesley College; our work together is here: 
https://github.com/openhatch/new-mini-tasks

The idea behind it is to provide a way to let some event administrator 
(me, so far) manually check a list of tasks for attendees of an open 
source outreach event to do that meaningfully contribute to an open source 
project, provide categorizations for the bugs, provide hints as to how one 
would solve the bugs, and (crucially) give me a way to manually review the 
bugs before showing them to attendees.

I architected it in the simplest way I could think of -- the "database" is 
a Google Docs spreadsheet. This one, in particular: 
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AoHP1ey91UqPdC1EUFV4aXBETmY3bFBzTFhpdG1ISEE&usp=sharing

(That link permits editing, so be nice!)

Shauna and I agreed yesterday that we should improve the app so that 
attendes can "claim" tasks in the UI, which should help people avoid 
stepping on each others' toes -- and help them work together on the same 
task. (Humans will continue to walk around the room and make sure people 
are collaboratin where appropriate, but tool support for this will be very 
important at http://umass.openhatch.org/ where we have >50 people signed 
up!!)

The problem is, those changes would be really messy if we stick to the 
current "database".

It'd be way better if someone wanted to port this to a different actual 
web framework, preferably Django but I'm willing to take when I can get. 
(-; Django seems appropriate here because the built-in admin system 
could be useful for doing what we do currently with the spreadsheet.

We do have an event tomorrow, where it'd be super nice to use this 
functionality. We do also have some data we'd need to import into it.

(Also: In the long run, I can imagine this replacing a bunch of the code 
and UI behind openhatch.org/search/ but it feels like more work to edit 
that code rather than improve this prototype.)

Having written this out, I will now go ping people on IRC to see if I can 
excite someone about doing this "port". If you're interested, do show up 
on IRC (#openhatch irc.freenode.net as always).

-- Asheesh.