yunity heartbeat 2016-10-16

Hackathon

The last two weeks were dominated by the yunity Hackathon in Berlin, on the weekend from 7th to 9th of October. After weeks of preparation, the event was really well-organized and focused on productive work.

To get a feeling of the event, you can watch the introduction video and task overview - here are the slides of Nick's and Tais' presentation. The Hackathon Retrospective was generally positive, with the only downsides being the short duration of the event.

We also roughly specified a few of the side projects that would be helpful to yunity: Mapping Existing Foodsharing Initiatives and Contributor Map Calendar. The yunity glocal / kickstart project was already started, contact Paul Free for more information. You can also read a more detailed /wiki/spaces/~Paul+Free/pages/66846733in his wiki space.

General

On 2016-10-07, Robert Werth also held a presentation on yunity in Frankfurt a.M. - you can have a look at the slides here.

Foodsharing.de Development.

A recent development within yunity: we are starting again with the development of foodsharing.de.

Foodsharing was originally written almost exclusively by the lovely Raphael Wintrich. He put the best part of two years of hard work and dedication into building the site. Most people would run out of motivation before completing it. [...]

There are probably many theories why development has slowed, the only one that makes sense to me is that this stuff is hard, over time I hope to learn exactly why. For now the task is breathe life into the development again.

~ Nick Sellen on the first post of the new foodsharing devblog

During the hackathon, we had a meeting on upcoming and long-term tasks, which also included a discussion on open-sourcing the code. We will review this in the beginning of November. If you are interested in it, join #foodsharing-chat on our Slack.

Matthias Larisch also wrote a statement on why he will continue with coding on foodsharing.de

The latest changes to the website are documented on this page in the foodsharing wiki, in German language. If you want to participate in the discussion, have look into our public issue tracker on Gitlab, or request access to the group to code with us.

Challenges/help needed

many things - are you knowledgeable about PHP? Then you are more welcome to join us!

Design Team.

Done

Legal clearance for using the Harabara font - Chrisi asked the author for permission and he gave it to us (look into the comments of Design Guidelines proposal for details)

In Progress

Discussion on the Design Guidelines proposal. This currently is the only well-formulated proposal for yunity design by Manuele Carlini, but there was some resistance back then when it was posted to Slack. Still, because of the (accepted) Open design proposal, it's fine for yunity members to use - or use a different design to their own liking. (Tilmann, Chrisi)

Challenges/help needed

Design for Foodsaving Tours

Foodsaving Tool.

Done

A brief high-level description about the Foodsaving Tool (Tilmann, Tais Real, Lars Wolf)

We welcome Konrad Becker in the coding team!

A lot of services are ready to talk to the backend - though they will be modified to a common style soon.

Over 94% of our code is covered by tests - tendency increasing! Yay!

In Progress

We are kickstarting the frontend in AngularJS - look at our Github issues to follow the process closely.

Challenges/help needed

Most of us still have to get familiar with AngularJS and figure out the best code architecture.

Foodsharing/-saving International.

Done

Management structure diagrams of Foodsharing Warsaw, DLC Nantes and Foodsharing.de (Tais Real, Janina Abels)

Writeup on Foodsharing Taipeh (Taiwan) on Existing initiatives from Stefan Simon.

An example of the enormous waste at festivals is documented on Foodsaving at festivals. There's a video that will blow your mind, and maybe motivate you to get active and start a foodsaving community! It's quite easy to save food and other things at those festivals if you have a few great activists.

Graphics and Drafts repository for visual things for spreading foodsaving - currently mostly drawings by Luisa from Copenhagen.

A new facebook group for connecting foodsaving groups worldwide. Many people are not active in our wiki or on Slack, so Tilmann's idea was to also gather people on facebook.

Two brainstorming meetings at the hackathon were organized by Tais Real, about the reliability of foodsavers and approaching businesses with the goal of starting foodsaving.

In Progress

A syscon on the appropriate name for FSINT and the slack channel fs-international has been started, the proposal phase is running until 2016-10-19 and the voting phase will start shortly afterwards.

IT-Service.

Done

Open up the Signup Autoresponder - that's the mail that people automatically get after filling out the join-the-team form on yunity.org. The goal is to keep it up-to-date with general information how to get started in yunity. (Paul Free, Janina Abels, Tilmann)

Updated the events page on yunity.org (Tilmann) - please write in Slack #website if you want to add an event!

In Progress

Setting up a Grafana/InfluxDB analytics setup to get nicer statistics for yunity and foodsharing.de servers. It's a really powerful tool, which might also help us in getting more insight how we can improve our software. (Matthias Larisch)

Structure.

Done

Tais Real collected many open tasks to make them visible for newcomers. Some examples: Researching existing initiatives, Organizing the Media-Kit, Translation and Contacting enthusiasts

A concise article about Awesome Active Autonomy by Douglas Webb - the basic working principle in yunity. Read it to get more insight in autonomous decision making!

Follow new applications in the Who-am-I section of the discourse forum. You can also follow the new entries on Slack in the #discourse channel.

In Progress

Collecting ideas how to improve the yunity wiki accessibility. Janina Abels created a proposal for a new FSINT landing page, and she really loves feedback on it
There's also a Slack channel #improve_wiki where you can participate in the process.

Connections.

Done

Nick Sellen, Matthias Larisch and Tilmann had a short informal meeting with Raphael Fellmer and Martin Schott from sharecy. Read a short summary on Collaboration possibilities.

Paul Free made a lot's of new connections during the freemarket in Berlin. Interviews with around 40 incl. gathering their contacts.

Challenges/help needed

...networking can be exausting. (Paul Freel)

Tour.

A really extensive report about the situation in Marseille by Anna O'Neill. The city is one of the first planned destinations of the yunity tour.

Some people plan to visit Valencia (Spain) in January 2016 and spread foodsharing and -saving.

Translation.

Done

Some ideas for Grammar conventions (in which order adjective should appear), contributed by Hans-Christian Eick.

A video guide how to translate the foodsharing dev blog, with an additional written guide on Slack (Matthias Larisch, Tilmann)

Full German foodsharing dev blog (Fenja Jacobs, Janina Abels)

WuppDays.

In Progress

Planning of the Mini-Wuppdays in Chemnitz by Anja Konhäuser and fr4nk 0nf1r3.

The WuppDays#12 Witzenhausen are planned by Paul Free and are expected to happen in November. Join the Slack channel #wuppdays_witzenhausen to stay tuned!

Pre-planning of December WuppDays in Kirchheim by Philip Engelbutzeder

Culture.

The Lamâsching Availability page still gets occasional updates, which range from usual to sexually open to not-so-serious.

Slight ongoing controversy about the Sadomâsching Culture, introduced by Bodhi Neiser and Kaiser Mikato. There are worries if this should be something that is publicly visible on the yunity wiki. There has been a proposal from Douglas Webb to make it only visible to members of yunity (wiki-editors), but so far no decision making process was started.

Glocal yunity.

(what is this? - ask Paul Free!)

Done

"not organized" a freemarket in Berlin. Made lots of local connections, including people interested in glocal foodsharing in Spain.