Planet Ergo

I attended my first Open Foundry meeting today, earlier this evening. I regret not having attended before, but then again, I'm away every once in a while, otherwise occupied some other time, or physically incapable of showing up ;-)

Anyway, let me first introduce you to what we refer to as Open Foundry...

While this meeting specifically focussed on the website that is going to run on openfoundry.nl, the greater goal of the Open Foundry is to further enable and increase community participation through a concept that we know as local user groups.

So, in this instance, we have a bunch of people already, that are very much interested in web technology developments. While the first version of the site will be in static HTML, it will be HTML 5 and CSS 3. That is, or so I'm told, funky business -and yes, even with the limited knowledge that I have in this specific area, both funky and business are accurate terms to use here.

The next step for this web-team is to get some communication platform going, as well as designing a web application (or rather, platform) in Rails 3. OOPS!

Several problems arise. There's no excellent IDE in Free Software, currently, capable of handling Rails 3 just right. Hell, even Rails 3 itself has some compatibility issues with Ruby 1.8.7 as well as Ruby 1.9.1, so it should be implemented using Phusion's Ruby 1.8.7 Enterprise Edition or Ruby 1.9.2. Nice one!

Long story short, the release engineers and system administrators kick in. Some source code management is going to need to be able to facilitate some sort of pragmatic source code management, it must be a collaborative effort, and it must be deployed across various stacks on various platforms using sustainable management and deployment methodologies (e.g. RPM and not Ruby's integrated gem package management or user-space bash-scripts under the RVM category).

This is exactly the area that I've been working on for a number of years. Hence, while not a RoR developer myself, I think I can be of value to the Open Foundry web development team. I hope they can be of help to Ergo Project as well ;-))