Gaia Programming Contest - Contributions

4. Apr 2008

Some months ago we announced our Gaia Programming Contest and the 1st of April was the deadline to submit contributions. We have received four contributions to the contest and all of them are GPL licensed so you can download and play with them yourself :)


Gaia Programming Contest


I have created video blogs demonstrating all the applications so that you can see roughly what the app is about before downloading and playing with it yourself.

  • Grurrah, a wiki-like system for sharing ideas about activities that reduces the stress on the environment.
  • Car Sharing, an application for "sharing" cars (or more exactly transportation) into a pool to reduce CO2 emissions due to increasing the people per car ratio.
  • Environmental Portal, a portal to discuss environmental problems in a forum like application.
  • Luftgitar CMS, a fully fledged CMS system.

All of the above applications have their specific strengths, some in other areas than others. Since I am a member of the jury I will leave those strengths up to you to find yourself and not talk about them for the specific applications. But some are stronger in the code than others, some are more creative than the others, some are more mature than others and some have larger potential in regards to solving environmental and global problems than others. Which ones I think are better for one or the other I must unfortunately at least until the jury have made a descision leave up to you to find out of ;)
But the whole process of the Gaia Programming Contest should be an Open Process. After all we believe in Open Standards and Open Source. So the obvious choice for this contest would be to hold an Open Process around the selection of the specific contributions. So please give your comments on which application you think should win and give arguments for why you think so in this blog.

The jury consists of;

We will decide upon who is to win the contest before 1st of May. And no matter what application we choose to be the winner, I think that several of these applications will have a long lifespan and that the world now has four more great GPL applications to play with :)

But only one will get the prize of 10,000 EUROs... ;)

Thank you to all who have helped us to spread the word about the contest. Thank you to all who have helped us out with ideas. But most of all; Thank you to all who gave us their contributions :)

Let us hope that this contest might bring us one step closer to being friends with Gaia instead of her enemies...


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Tags: gaia contest
Comments
RE: Gaia Programming Contest - Contributions
Posted 6. Apr 2008 by anonymous
What can I say?
I have never imagined how a contest with that kind of pricemoney would attract so few contestants, and with such questionable quality of the produced material.

The pricemoney here would mean a couple of months salary for a fulltime job. Quite a large number of working hours, and definitely more than enough to make something that actually works, and also looks good.

How do you, the developers of the library, feel about the number of contributions, and the quality of the applications submitted? You don't have to be specific about each application, but the contributions in general.
RE: Gaia Programming Contest - Contributions
Posted 6. Apr 2008 by anonymous
I think that several of the applications here "actually work", though some of them aren't that mature and gives you good points. Anyway, several of the submissions are really great working stuff which I think would cost way more than 10,000 EURO to build from scratch if you were to hire developers or something like that. So I don't see how your point is true on a general level.
RE: Gaia Programming Contest - Contributions
Posted 6. Apr 2008 by anonymous
Which of the submissions, in the state of which they are presented in the videos, do you think would actually cost 10k Euros if you hired professionals to build them? I can possibly imagine only one. The other three contributions are honestly very simple in functionality and design. I am sorry, but I can hardly picture them categorized as "really great working stuff".

My point is that the number and level of contributions would alert me if Gaia was a product of mine. Either there are not many developers using this library, or the library is too hard to use to build a prototype in a short time. It might of course also be that the contest wasn't marketed wide enough to attract a large community. I don't know the reason, but it would certainly make me wonder.

I am in no way trying to criticize or offend any of the contributers. I am sure there is a lot of work and good thinking behind all of the 4 applications. But I suspect that most of the contributions came from not too experienced developers.

Anyway, these were my reactions when I saw the videos presenting the applications.
RE: Gaia Programming Contest - Contributions
Posted 7. Apr 2008 by anonymous
What a pity you didn't contact me about the issues with the third contribution. Might be a problem with the environment, since it works fine on the two machines I tested with. You could at least fix the video resolution.
RE: Gaia Programming Contest - Contributions
Posted 7. Apr 2008 by anonymous
Don't worry, no contribution will be voted down neither because of local configuration issues nor because of video resolution issues ;) I actually had your sample up running and got to test it, but of course when I was going to record the video, I had config problems :( But don't worry, no contribution will be judged because of formalities :)
RE: Gaia Programming Contest - Contributions
Posted 8. Apr 2008 by anonymous
No worries, I just could hear my heart pounding when I saw that video :) I can't see the text in the video, but it might be a session timeout problem, since I didn't implement any error handling for requests :P
RE: Gaia Programming Contest - Contributions
Posted 8. Apr 2008 by anonymous
The world is full of passive whiners (http://www.dzone.com/links/10000_euro_going_nowhere.html), and then there's a small amount of people with a positive attitude who gave it a shot. I take my hat off for those who contributed. Regarding the quality of the contributions: There's always a balance how much time you can spend on such a contribution. You weight your chances to win against how much time you loose from your personal life. And don't forget how much time it takes to come up with a good idea and an environment for extending the contributions. It takes easily much more time than building a flashy site.
RE: Gaia Programming Contest - Contributions
Posted 8. Apr 2008 by anonymous
First part; poetry :) Second part; insight...! :)
RE: Gaia Programming Contest - Contributions
Posted 14. Apr 2008 by morten...mertner,com
I would have made a contribution if the door had been left open for reusing/converting existing projects, but the notion that it had to be environmental sort of ruled that out. While one might think it's a cool idea I just thought it was a major turnoff and in any case both overly idealistic and irrelevant for development contest. Not that I mind helping the environment but I don't see the relevance in relation to a development contest, unless you're specifically looking to receive functionally useless contributions. At the very least there should have been official notes on how entries would be scored in terms of criteria weighting, so that one could judge how to distribute efforts in advance.

 
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