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CMS Gardens very own Stephan Luckow (@luckow@luckow.org) explained the idea behind his project “Follow the money” for the CloudFest Hackathon.

Transcript (auto generated)

Simon:
What is your project called, and what is it all about?

Stephan:
What is the project called? Oh, fun fact, we renamed it because it’s so complex to remember.
Website, public website, transparency, funding, money, or something like that.
And we identified a really easy name, so we renamed it to Follow the Money.
And the idea is to scan all the public sector website URLs, here for the hackers on only cities from Germany, and to identify the CMS behind to get an idea where our tax money goes.

Simon:
What will your tool actually do? Like scan websites and then…

Stephan:
Project has a pipeline, a workflow pipeline or a technical pipeline.
Plan our domain sourcing relies on wikidata so we documented the queries which we which we throw against the api of wikidata and then sourced urls from different categories here for the hackathon with the country id germany and the urls are thrown against another api from a tim’s product It’s called versionmanager.io and versionmanager detects the TMS and also the IP address and makes a screenshot.

Stephan:
It’s possible to detect the version of the CMS. And then the JSON file is thrown against headless CMS called Directus.
And inside directors, we created a data structure to connect a front-end client API against the Directus API.
So on our website, follow-the-money.org, follow minus the minus money.
Oh, I have to learn.

Stephan:
Yep, so if you open the website in the browser, you’ll see our first crawl from last night.
We detected nearly 50% of nearly 1,000 URLs.

Stephan:
And our task for the morning today is to get an idea if it’s static content or is this headless CMS.
The version manager has to learn something about special German CMS like CMS Fiona or Webplication or ICIS.
So there are a few crazy, looks like not open source software.
So maybe we have to train the version manager to detect them.
So the goal of all of the money is to have a solid pipeline in the first step with maybe all the URLs from Germany, from the public sector.
But after that, we want to open up the whole pipeline and offer them to our friends from the European country.
So um i’m totally interested in comparing cms in france to italy uh to that might be interesting yeah then let’s see if maybe italy is a ploneland i have no clue from what i’ve learned today from our first um first sample of uls is germany is a type of three country so especially for our our first batch of city uls but it’s okay we are cms garden and we are kind of switzerland so we are totally unbiased and um yeah let’s see in maybe three months what we can tell you as an interested person about the landscape in germany will.

Simon:
Your site also tracks changes over time? Because that might also be interesting to have like a snapshot in time from 2024 and in two or three years see like now….

Stephan:
Sorry to interrupt, you our plan is to have a cron job on a quarterly base so every quarter is a snapshot interesting.

Simon:
Okay i guess that is it thank you thank you for taking the time good luck with the rest of the hackathon.

Stephan:
Oh you mean the next 20 minutes? okay yes yes thank you thank you.

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The first session at at @wpswitzerland was all about meetups. Many meetups still struggle with attendance after the pandemic. The group in Barcelona, for example, fell from ~200 attendees to about 25.

Finding free venues is becoming increasingly difficult. However, there are still ways to source free venues. Universities, for example, are often happy to lend their space. Coworking spaces often serve the dual purpose of providing the venue and promoting the event in their community.

Sponsored venues (both in-kind and paid-for) are an alternative to free venues. Of course, WordPress Community Support can also pay for a venue if no free alternative is available. 

Live streaming meetups/online seem not to be attractive for many organizers. It’s a question of personal prioritization: do you, as a meetup organizer, want to foster local connection or reach as many people as possible? 

Bern follows a hybrid approach and tries to balance the in-person event and livestream. 

Starting a new meetup is always

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Elias Hackradt from @cloudron introduced us to their project “Hack the Hackathon” at the CloudFest Hackathon.

Transcript (auto generated)

Simon:
What is your project called and what is it all about?

Elias:
Okay, our project is called Hack the Hackathon. The project is a creation.
It sounds like a meta project, actually.

Simon:
It does, yeah.

Elias:
Yeah. We had the idea of how do you do a hackathon?
What’s needed for it? What software do you need? What’s involved with everything?
So we’re from Cloud Run, and we have a platform that makes installation of force-based application on a single server very easy, like with domain management.

Elias:
Backup management, certificates and everything so there was also a very easy starting point like then we just wanted to template everything and then create a one-click installer so people can use it but our project escalated very much because as they do as they do because we have quite a big group of technical and non-technical people.

Elias:
And the one part is doing like the conceptual part they talked to like Carol and everyone else from the CloudFest and got everything that they need to know about like what do you have to do for hosting a hackathon what’s the pre-game what do you need to plan for and everything so there’s a lot of conception involved and now we have like I think maybe four or five A4 pages of like documentation on what you need to do for a hackathon how to get sponsors how to do like accessibility and diversity and everything and then catering with that we have the one-click installer platform that if you want to do a hackathon right now let’s say for example you are a small community of let’s say um a small linux distribution a small a small linux flavor there’s like so many and you want to do a hackathon so what you have to do you have to figure out okay how do we organize it how do we get people how do we get investors sponsors and everything then how do we do the hosting what tools can we use and what’s what needs to be be taken care of and now since we compiled everything from the cloud fest all the knowledge from all the past five six years you can actually just use the guidebook as a reference click the button and then you have all the tools you need you have the mailing client newsletters you have like the chat for everyone internal external and everything ready to go with a very comprehensive guidebook.

Simon:
So let’s let’s reiterate on that you’ve not only used this hackathon to build a tool to to run hackathons, but also compile all the additional information on top, like as you said, with accessibility, what you have to do, and so on.
Interesting.

Elias:
So the idea was that hackathons these days is not mainly 100% technical.
It can also be, for example, if you’re in the medical field or if you have a kindergarten or something like that, you can do something like that as well.
It can be a very social event and not techy at all.
So the hackathon term right now is more like a description on how you gather people together and work in groups together. So we wanted to provide a tool that is easy to use for everyone with like lower resources.
So everyone can benefit from the style of the hackathon.
And since we are the technical people here, our also goal in my mind was, if my mom can use it, it’s user friendly.
So if my mom can use it, read the guide and click the button, and then she can host the hackathon.
That would be perfect. So we tried that.

Simon:
Definitely make it sound easy to run a hackathon now.
I’m very curious where this whole project will lead to. So I’m looking forward to that. Thank you for taking the time.

Elias:
No problem. Thank you for having me.

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Time flies when you enjoy CloudFest. It’s time for the final CF 2024 guide.

Thursday

At 9:55, Automattic’s Jesse Friedman takes to the stage to discuss the pivotal role Automattic wants to play in helping hosting companies thrive.

It’s time for privacy, or, to be more precise, for the future of privacy. Don’t miss Christian Dawson’s talk at 12:40.

Before we finish the week, at 16:10, Steve Crocker, one of the key contributors to the ARPANET project, will take us on a journey to the early days in “The ARPANET: First steps toward the Internet“.

17:00 marks the official end of CloudFest 2024. 

But don’t worry. If you’ll stick around for another night, there’s a last party to attend. The BierFest will start at 19:00 at the Hotel Krønasår.

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* beep beep beep * it’s time to get up, get some food, and get ready for another day of CloudFesting! 

This is what I will take a closer look at today. 

Wednesday

At 11:35, you can glimpse how Rob Seger explains how Malware works.

At 12:15, my friend Ronald Gijsel and his colleagues Roslyn Lavery and Matthias Reinholz are up with “Hosting Amazing Experiences: Fueling WordPress Success with Woo.

Are you ready for an hour of pitches and networking? Then you should head to PitchCamp, where Jonathan Wold and Tammie Lister will bring product creators and hosting providers together for some speed dating… eh, speed pitching.

My personal highlight of the day is at 17:30, when Eliot Higgins, the founder of the award-winning investigative collective Bellingcat, takes the stage to discuss misinformation and truth on the internet.