Virtual GNU Radio Hackfest

[Martin Braun]

It's been about a year since the pandemic started, making this a pretty 
late thing. Better late than never though: We would like to organize 
another hackfest, but this time, we want to do it online.

We have a main theme for the HF, which is to reduce the number of open 
issues on the issue tracker: https://github.com/gnuradio/gnuradio/issues

As I write this, we have 387 open issues. Which is almost a 100 issues 
better than a few weeks ago, but still. After we attacked the pull 
request queue a few months ago (down to 17 open pull requests, only one 
of which is older than 3 weeks!), we want to try and achieve the same 
with the issue tracker.

We also have a vague idea how we want to do this. A main Jitsi call 
shall be one of the places the hackfest will happen, paired with a 
Twitch stream. That means that part of the hackfest will happen in 
public. Of course, we want to leverage our Matrix chat to coordinate 
groups. Other than that, we are not sure ourselves how we want to run 
the hackfest, and this email is for you to provide some feedback.


** How do we want to do the hackfest exactly? **

We have some vague notions:

- As mentioned before, we'll have a main stream (on Twitch) and a Jitsi 
call associated with that, which shall be public (we might have to add a 
lobby and an admin just to avoid malicious stream snipers, but it shall 
be otherwise easy to join). A small group of people can be active in 
this call, and their activities will be public. I'm hoping there'll be a 
coming-and-going of people who want to showcase something.

- Others can freely organize via chat and their own video/screensharing 
calls. NO ONE is forced to be on camera on Twitch.

- Content of the hackfest can be people actually fixing the bugs on the 
tracker (they can livecode this), or newbies being taught things by more 
experienced GNU Radio hackers, or people from the project (plus whoever 
cares) going through the issue tracker and adding tags, or [insert your 
idea here].

- If you don't care about the issue tracker, but still want to join, 
that's of course fine too! We know from the past that having a theme 
helps such hackfests though, and makes it easier for people with less 
experience to join.

We'll be honest: None of this takes much organizing, but maybe it'll be 
effective. We honestly have no idea how this could turn out.

** When are doing this? **

Again, this is open and we await some feedback. We don't think a 
multi-day online hackfest will attract a lot of people who might 
otherwise travel to such an event. Or maybe it might-- please let us know!

If it's a single-day, the day of the week is also up for debate. 
"Saturday" has been thrown around a lot, although that might be tough 
for people with kids who are looking forward to a computer-free weekend.

Personally, I would like to stretch the HF to accommodate multiple time 
zones comfortably. Not sure if Ozzies/Asians/Russians (<- in their 
native countries, of course) would like to join, but they could start 
off the hackfest, handing it over to Europeans and Africans, who then 
pass the baton to the Americans. We've usually had most contributors 
from EU and Americas join, so it seems likely that such an event would 
start early afternoon EU time. Again, your feedback is appreciated.

Any dates that are preferred? Please let us know!