Our checklist for DHX:
We really need to find out where it's going to be!
Tentatively: June 3 - some question of all-weekend versus Saturday night.
We'll need to announce DHX in all the regular places and then some once we have the date and location set. "Media" targets: Valleywag, Techcrunch, Boing Boing, Om Malik?
Metafilter/Metafilter Projects ?
Teams will have to register, so we need to open up registration ~two weeks before the event date.
We'll need to get hosting accounts set up with Erica and preconfigured with basic Apache/Perl/PHP/Python/Ruby+Rails/MySQL. (Erica adds: Most likely scenario will be that Simpli will donate 1 server to the project and give one trusted person [David/Jeff/?] root access to configure a proper dev environment. Simpli will be available for hardware maintenance as necessary. When it comes time to shut down updates, just turn off FTP and SSH access to users. Voila!)
We'll need to reserve the Finnish & Star Wars domain names and configure DNS to point to the hosting servers. We need to set a PayPal account and configure IPN callbacks so we can trace money flows (to be used in judging). We need to write a realtime scoreboard to let folks see who is in the lead.
We need to make sure our network at the event stays in good shape.
Tomh will build a box to provide Squid caching of internet traffic and a first hit redirect to this wiki for new users. I'll try to get this done in the next week or two, and I think we should place it somewhere, possibly my house as the main gateway for a period of time before the event for testing purposes. Possibly someone else might want to help package this up as a simple singe cd devhouse firewall distro similar to ipcop but customized for easy install of just what we need. Also, the wireless network would work better if we named all the access points the same, and verified that there was broad spectrum usage. Maybe tomh needs to donate some access points to shdh? Especially if we plan on moving between locations.
Firewall will provide the following: Add to this list if you need/want anything else.
We need to figure out what kind of prizes folks will get for 1st/2nd/3rd. More free hosting?
We need to make sure that people's works are legal for them to contribute. Some basic form of IP agreement might be necessary. We also need to figure out what happens at the end of the competition and enable an option where the winner can actually go full steam ahead on their project.
Do we charge $25 for registration? Do we take a cut of the PayPal revenues?
Along with coming up with premade Finnish/Star Wars identities (with default logos designed), weren't we going to do a theme thing?
How are we going to pass out identities? Random? First come, first serve?
I was thinking of having some graphic designers work out a bunch of logo ideas. (The design process for logos usually results in several potentials - see: http://www.mattfrederickdesign.com/logoStory.html). If we can get a pool of potential logos people could pick out a logo from the pool. Ideally the graphic designer(s) would be at DHX and be available for logo refinement / aesthetic consulting.
Contest starts Friday night at 7pm. You can't use any code written before then in your project unless it's Open Source. Coding stops at 11:59pm Sunday night at which point your login sessions are terminated and your accounts disabled. You may continue to promote your service and answer support questions, but you cannot add any features or fix any bugs (however trivial or critical). If you have been found to try and work around this by accessing / updating the machine in any way, you will be disqualified. Any attempt to hack, confuse, or provide false data to our judging system will immediately disqualify your team. The winner will be announced two weeks after the contest begins, tentatively at a party on June 16. Revenue scoring will be final as of 6:59pm on that Friday.
We had a few options for the trial time and details, starting with:
hack from SHDH X start until 11:59PM PDT Sunday night, and then:
1) one month. accounts locked out for a month and see what happens,
whichever site made the most money, wins
2) two weeks. accounts locked out for two weeks, whichever site made the
most money, wins
3) iteration option. accounts locked out for two weeks, then teams get to
spend the weekend iterating bug fixes / performance improvements etc. (UI is
still "frozen"), then either another two weeks to make money, or month, then
winner is the one with the most.
(afterthought: I think the teams should be allowed to keep their
company/site blogs updated, as a way of doing customer support, promotion,
etc. since folks could presumably do this from their own blogs anyway, no
reason to disallow it from the corporate site. I believe the WordPress
option on Simpli should allow for easy setup of posting-only access.)
^^ they could just set up a blog at wordpress.com for the contest company/site. we could have them premade, one for each identity package.
Afterwards, teams may decide to:
A) take over their site and keep it running as a business (pay for hosting,
switch paypal to their own etc.)
B) liquidate - have SHDH put their site on eBay and auction it off, and take
the proceeds (with an encouraged option to donate 10% to SHDH). Encourage
VCs to get into a bidding war on eBay - that would be entertaining to watch.
C) if it doesn't sell an eBay, or if the team should choose to, public
domain all the code etc. from the site back to the community for anyone to
do with as they please.