Two days ago I saw on Andre Petcu's Facebook that he is organising small hackathon in Romania, so without any hesitation I grabbed him and asked couple questions about his plans and hacking scene in Romania.
What do you hope to achieve by organising this hackathon?
By this event we want to take an existing application called Alaveteli built by mySociety and translate it and adapt it to Romania's needs. Alaveteli is a application that helps regular citizens to send freedom of information requests to public administrations. At the end of the event I hope I will have a working beta. The first time I tried to install it I had some issues regarding the mailing system wich is quite complicated for this specific application. Usually hackathons try to build new software or contribute to existing ones, this one tries to reuse an existing project.
What will happen to the projects coded during the event?
I don't think we will code at this event. We will code only if wee need to do some custom behavior for Romania's legislation which require code changes. If we do code either we will push back the changes to the upstream Alaveteli project or publish the code as a separate project. In both cases we will keep the original license AGPLv3 since it's a free software license. Probably after we launch the site we will contribute code to the main project but this is not our immediate goal.
Is it only for coders?
We have 6 people who said they are going and 2 who said they might come. Out of these only 4 are coders so it's not only for coders. Others will work on the translation, on the new design, on the marketing part or just on the testing of the web site. We need to test if the web site suits our needs and to understand how to properly administer it.
How often do you (or anyone else in Romania) organises such events?
Lately hackathons have been quite often in Romania. I don't attend all of them. Ceata organized last year two: one for hartapoliticii.ro (a web site not developed by Ceata but strongly supported by it) and one in partnership wit several organizations which had the goal to build free applications for journalists. You can find more information about this event on http://thesponge.eu website. This is the first event this year organized by Ceata, but Ceata participated at Firefox OS app days at the end of January this year. Also other organizations run similar events for example TechSoup's "Restart Romania" is quite popular.
Is this only about mySociety software or other code as well?
We need an mature application for sending FOI requests and mySociety has one. We will definitely do other hackathons in the future.
What projects/subsmissions do you already have?
This hackathon is not a contest, as some of the hackathons are like Open Media Challenge organized by The sponge I mentioned earlier. In this hackathon there is only one team dedicated to one project.
