We’re due for another Ironcoder contest soon. The eCamm guys won the special Ironcoder/C4 event with their iPhone Video Conferencing application. With Leopard just around the corner we should be able to host a very interesting new contest.
But before a date for the next contest is chosen I’d like to ask the community for help with Ironcoder. I’ve been running Ironcoder pretty much on my own (with help from the usual suspects) but I need help. The last Ironcoder contest before C4 took a lot of time and effort to organise. Finding sponsors, judging, tallying scores, allocating prizes all took a long time. This was all amplified by the huge success of the contest.
So I need help. I’d like volunteers to help with some of the grunt work of running Ironcoder. There are a few things Ironcoder needs:
I think Ironcoder really needs some kind of automation put in place to help organise the sponsors, entrants and entries. I’m thinking a simple web-based system to allow users to register, create and edit sponsorships, upload entries, vote for entries, assign prizes, issue prizes and so on.
The Ironcoder automation system could be written in php or (ideally) Turbogears or even ROR, I don’t much care. The Ironcoder blog currently uses Wordpress, so some kind of Wordpress integration may be necessary (who knows, maybe there is one or more Wordpress plugins out there that Ironcoder could use).
I would like to some improvements made to the look of the blog. The standard Wordpress theme is incredibly boring. A custom theme (or just a really good looking pre-existing theme) would be great. While we’re at it I’d like to find people willing to maintain the blog and organise it a bit better and perhaps act as editors. I’d like to move away from using blog posts to announce contests, sponsors and entries and use a format more suited.
I’ve been trying to organise the previous contest entries in subversion on code.google.com I haven’t been able to finish this and some help would be appreciated.
Ironcoder has been very successful so far, but to continue being successful in the future and to grow it needs work. Work that I don’t think I can do alone (and stay sane).
So what else do we need to do to Ironcoder to improve things? I don’t know, but I think the Mac Developer community should have a voice. Feel free to add comments to this blog post if you have any ideas. Alternatively I’ve set up an #ironcoder IRC Channel on freenode.net