dribdat/dridbot

A rather dashing companion for your hackathons

Tooling for time-limited, team-based, open-by-default cooperation

dribdat is an open source web application that playfully assists teams collaborating on technical projects with data. Designed to support your awesome hackathon, it is used as a versatile toolbox for civic tech events: bundling high quality guidelines, timers, trackers, loggers, integrating with prototyping tools, group chat, code repositories, open data APIs, and more!

A screenshot of a Dribdat-powered event.

Purpose

The philosophy of this project, in a nutshell, is:

• live and let live (no tech religion, use whatever design / dev / doc tools you want as long as they are accessible to your team)
• commit sustainably (aggregate outputs in standard web of data formats for optimal search and archiving)
• create in safe spaces (embedded code of conduct, works offline, minimal privacy footprint).

Install the software, read our Whitepaper, or try dribdat yourself at a community hackathon.

For more background and references, see the User Handbook. If you need help or advice in setting up your event, or would like to contribute to the project: please get in touch via Discussions or GitHub Issues. You can follow and support the project on OpenCollective or Codeberg

Quickstart

The Dribdat project can be deployed to any server capable of serving Python applications, and is set up for fast deployment using Ansible or Docker. The first user that registers becomes an admin, so don't delay!

If you would like to run dribdat on any other cloud or local machine, there are additional instructions in the Deployment guide. Information on contributing and extending the code can be found in the Contributors guide, which includes API documentation, and other details.

See also backboard: a responsive, modern alternative frontend, and our dridbot chat client. Both demonstrate reuse of the dribdat API.

If you need support with your deployment, please reach out through Discussions.

Credits

This project is currently mantained by @loleg. See Contributors and Forks to find other users of this project.

Special thanks to the Open Data, Open Networking and Open Source communities in 🇨🇭 Switzerland for the many trials and feedbacks through over one hundred events. Connect with us for your next Data Expedition!

This project is inspired by the work of many wonderful hackathonistas to the East, West, North, and South of here. We are grateful to F. Wieser and M.-C. Gasser at Swisscom for conceptual inputs and financial support at an early stage of this project. This application was based on Steven Loria's cookiecutter-flask, a more modern version of which is cookiecutter-flask-restful - and could be a good basis for your own hackathon projects.

Additional and ♥-felt thanks for your contributions to: Alexandre Cotting, Anthony Ritz, Chris Mutel, Fabien Schwob, Gonzalo Casas, Jonathan Schnyder, Jonathan Sobel, Philip Shemella, Thomas Amberg, Yusuf Khasbulatov .. and all the participants and organizers sending in bugs and requests! 🤗

License

This project is open source under the MIT License.

Due to the use of the boto3 library for S3 support, there is a dependency on OpenSSL via awscrt. If you use these features, please note that the product includes cryptographic software written by Eric Young ([email protected]) and Tim Hudson ([email protected]).

dridbot's Issues

SlackDataStore is deprecated

A warning on app startup.

SlackDataStore is deprecated and will be removed in the next major version. See project documentation for a migration guide.

The first step would be to find that documentation.. a quick search hasn't helped yet.

Circular structure error

First filed upstream this is still happening, but only once a project gets to a certain part in it's progress.

2020-05-03T12:22:23.990362+00:00 app[web.1]: [Sun May 03 2020 12:22:23 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)] ERROR TypeError: Converting circular structure to JSON
2020-05-03T12:22:23.990366+00:00 app[web.1]:     --> starting at object with constructor 'Timeout'
2020-05-03T12:22:23.990366+00:00 app[web.1]:     |     property '_idlePrev' -> object with constructor 'TimersList'
2020-05-03T12:22:23.990367+00:00 app[web.1]:     --- property '_idleNext' closes the circle
2020-05-03T12:22:23.990367+00:00 app[web.1]:     at JSON.stringify (<anonymous>:null:null)
2020-05-03T12:22:23.990368+00:00 app[web.1]:     at Brain.<anonymous> (/app/node_modules/hubot-redis-brain/src/redis-brain.js:93:42)
2020-05-03T12:22:23.990368+00:00 app[web.1]:     at Brain.emit (events.js:310:20)
2020-05-03T12:22:23.990369+00:00 app[web.1]:     at Brain.save (/app/node_modules/hubot/src/brain.js:102:10)
2020-05-03T12:22:23.990369+00:00 app[web.1]:     at Timeout._onTimeout (/app/node_modules/hubot/src/brain.js:134:14)
2020-05-03T12:22:23.990369+00:00 app[web.1]:     at listOnTimeout (internal/timers.js:549:17)
2020-05-03T12:22:23.990370+00:00 app[web.1]:     at processTimers (internal/timers.js:492:7)

Framework no longer maintained

Even though there were some (automatic?) commits this year, there have not been any Hubot releases since 2019. This project is also no longer compatible with up-to-date versions of Node.js and other components. We should research if there are any active forks of Hubot, alternative JS frameworks we could switch to, or move to another platform like Chatterbot (Python).

Standalone functionality

This chatbot should be a useful hackathon companion even if not connected to dribdat. Discuss . . .

404 error from dribdat

We get a repeating page not found error, probably an incorrect call to the API. The 404 page should mention it's URL somewhere on the server side. But the error logs of the client are also lacking.