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Reid Beels edited this page Dec 3, 2013 · 6 revisions

The following are goals for the future of OpenConferenceWare. They are not currently listed in any meaningful order.

DONE: Upgrade to latest Rails version

OpenConferenceWare's master branch is now based on Rails 3.2.14, and drops our support for themes. We are maintaining a stable branch for existing installations.

We would like to upgrade OCW to Rails 4 and reintroduce theme customization by converting it to a Rails engine.

DONE: Replace authentication system with OmniAuth

Our current authentication system is based on hacked versions of the restful_authentication and open_id_authentication plugins. This section of the codebase is extremely brittle and poses one of the largest roadblocks as we move towards a newer Rails version.

We would like to replace the existing system with one based on OmniAuth, while maintaining compatibility for existing OpenID-based users.

Add a registration system

In order to provide a more integrated experience for conference attendees, and to make OCW attractive to a greater selection of conference organizers, we would like to explore the possibility of building an integrated registration system.

This would include payment processing (through an external provider) and integrated speaker/attendee user accounts.

Improve admin UI to make common configurations easy

Currently, the process of configuring OCW for an event involves editing a lot of feature toggles in yaml files. We would like to move more of this into the web UI, possibly with a step-by-step installer process for new users.

Support public proposal voting

Since OpenConferenceWare was built primarily to serve the needs of Open Source Bridge, it has many features tailored to that conference's content selection process. Specifically, members of the content selection committee are allowed to vote and leave specific comments on sessions, which are then reviewed by the committee as a group to make final selections.

Other conferences have requested the ability to open this voting system up the members of the public.

Build UI for session schedule generator

We've written code to generate a first-draft schedule that tries to take session popularity and room size into account, and avoid conflicts between talks that have been favorited by the same users. This currently exists as an external script and should be integrated into the OCW UI.

Add ability to send emails to various groups of users

Communicating with conference attendees is an important part of running a successful event. Open Source Bridge currently uses tools provided by our registration system and another external mailing list service to email attendees, but this involves a rigamarole of importing and exporting CSV files.

We would like to integrate more of this communication directly into OCW, either by interfacing with external services or by sending email directly.

Publish system automation code for easier deployments

In order to simplify the process of deploying OpenConferenceWare for people less familiar with the Rails deployment process, we would like to publish a bundle of Chef code for deploying OCW on a fresh server.

Create a responsive default design

To allow the site to be viewed easily on mobile and desktop devices. Moving in this direction, we've added a default Bootstrap-based theme.