Ignite/Hackanooga2012

Hackanooga: Chattanooga Ignite Hack Days
Sept. 14-16, 2012
Register here

If you enjoy pushing the limits of the open web platform, we want you to join us September 14-16 in the Gig City of Chattanooga, Tennessee for a weekend of good food, good friends, and — most importantly — a unique opportunity to get your hands dirty on a citywide, 1 gigabit per second network.

This wiki is intended primarily as a place for team formation and idea sharing among teams planning to go to the Chattanooga Hack Days. If you're curious about the event, read more at the Mozilla Hacks blog: "Push the web further at Hackanooga"

App idea / team formation discussion call
Conference Number: 800-503-2899
Secondary Conference Number: +1 303-248-0817
7-Digit Access Code: 5435555
Tues., Aug. 21 @ 5 PM ET
Tues., Aug. 28 @ 5 PM
Tues., Sept. 4 @ 5 PM
Tues., Sept. 11 @ 5 PM

For the calls themselves, please use this etherpad to take notes. It's a little easier for real-time communication and we will migrate it to the wiki after the meeting:

Hackanooga2012 etherpad

Apps and App Teams Forming for Hackanooga

We're interested in demonstrating innovation in education, workforce training, healthcare, and other public benefit areas. We'll be prototyping using client-side open web technologies (HTML5, WebGL, WebRTC) and a local private cloud. The types of applications we're talking about include:

• applications that require high bandwidth (100Mbps to 1Gbps)
• applications using huge data sets
• applications that take advantage of layer 2 programmability/software defined networking
• demonstrations of the above running point-to-point with local anchor institutions (over community fiber or wireless)

Team idea 1: High-Quality Open Source Web Conferencing

WHO: Fred Dixon (ffdixon .at. bigbluebutton .dot. org), Calvin Walton, Ryan Seys

WHAT: Extend BigBlueButton to support HTML5 clients (using WebRTC).

NEEDS: Create a WebRTC 'server' that can accept incoming connections from multiple WebRTC clients and multiplex the HD audio and video. Control of presentations, chat, and whiteboard can be handled by BigBlueButton. Store the HD audio and video streams to separate files for later processing for playback of the recorded session. Also get some UI design skills to review/improve our current HTML5 prototype interface to BigBlueButton.

Team Idea 2: 3D videoconferencing

WHO: Andor Salga
WHAT: 3D videoconfereing using Kinect sensors for capture.
NEEDS: WebGL wizard

Discussion: Why not just use Kinect with Zigfu and either 3.js or Unity? (WebGL would likely make this impossible to complete within the hackathon period.)

Team Idea 3: Chattanooga Public Library

WHO: Nate Hill, Chattanooga Public Library
WHAT: Imagine an immersive, interactive information environment where a map of the city of Chattanooga is projected onto the floor. Looking and walking around the map, you orient yourself. First you find the street you live on and step over to it. You tap your foot twice and zoom in. Cool! You scuff your foot to the left and zoom back out. Next you find the location of the art museum and the piece of public sculpture you love. You tap your foot once on an icon, and another projector lights up the wall with information about this piece of sculpture. A life size photograph of a Tom Otterness bronze is displayed, along with biographical information about the artist and suggestions of other similar works nearby or in other cities. Links to resources about Otterness, bronze casting, and public art from the library catalog and across the internet are displayed as well. The Otterness sculpture is actually a part of a larger exhibition, a tour of public art in Chattanooga. When you discover this, you tap again and all of the other items on this tour light up on the floor around you.
This is a proposal to create an interactive digital map of the city of Chattanooga that would be projected on the concrete floor of the fourth floor space in the Chattanooga Public Library. The map would make use of projection mapping technology, gig-speed wireless connectivity, Esri GIS data, and Open Street Maps to create an inverted augmented reality space. This map would be an exhibition space, an urban planning tool, and an educational asset for Chattanooga. In addition, the map could link to other gig-speed communities featuring similar compatible geographic interfaces and exhibitions.
NEEDS: Development help. I'm rallying some folks from the Chattanooga area, but expertise hacking this together would be fantastic.

Discussion: It's cool and feasible, but not sure how this utilizes a Gigabit network. (Yosun 21:01, 24 August 2012 (PDT))

@Yosun I was trying to tell the story of an inspiring, immersive geographic interface, knowing that it's one implementation of something that could be much bigger. If you simply wanted to make this interface leverage the gig, you'd have location based videoconferencing. I step on a point that has an active user, *blip*, I open a live channel with that user. Done. Hopefully, this is an idea that I hope has hooks, an idea that is extensible. If you had an immersive location based tool like this, what would you make it do?

Team Idea 4: High performance distributed research computing (for science, business, etc)

WHO: Proposed by Roger Pincombe (OkGoDoIt), but very open for suggestions and discussion

WHAT: Projects like Folding@home (http://folding.stanford.edu), Seti@Home (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) and LHC@Home (http://lhcathome.web.cern.ch/LHCathome/) enable researchers to harness spare computing power to do insane amounts of distributed number crunching. There are even commercial efforts like CPUsage (http://cpusage.com/) and Plura Processing (http://www.pluraprocessing.com/). One of issues with massively distributed computing is that the network overhead limits the types of tasks that can be effectively distributed: tasks that are easily broken into separate chunks that can be worked on independently. The software clients download a data set, process it, and then upload results.

With the power of gigabit internet, massively distributed computing could be applied to a much wider set of scenarios. Perhaps systems that require constant communication among the workers or where data sets cannot be broken into reasonably small sizes for computation. I'm no expert in distributed computing and I don't have a specific idea yet, but this is an area I think will be hugely empowered by the rise of superfast internet. I encourage us all to discuss possible scenarios where this could be applied, or even methods to allow arbitrary computation (like less expensive AWS EC2 spot instances for data processing) without compromising the security of the end user. Maybe even client software that can run on smartphones (at night, when charging and connected to home wifi). Millions of surprisingly powerful smartphones are idle for a large portion of the night. With "big data" being the buzzword that it currently is, I imagine there is a lot of potential here.

I can add some specific ideas here soon, but I wanted to get the discussion started and see what you all think.

NEEDS: This is less of an idea and more of a starting point for idea discussion. It would be great if people more familiar with distributed computing and "big data" can add their thoughts.

DISCUSSION: (your thoughts here...)