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Maemo.org Coding Competition 2016

Revision as of 13:35, 28 September 2016

NOT VALID YET

Introduction

Welcome to the maemo.org Coding Regatta 2016-2017 wiki page! Beginning on Monday X of November, and running for 3 months. This year's competition has the following three categories: Something new, Fixing/Updating and Beginner. Whether you are an experienced developer, porter, hacker or just a beginner on your very first hacks/codes, we have a category that suits you and your codings! Entries for Maemo & Mer-based devices are eligible.

In times like these, without Nokia or any other corporate entity sponsoring prizes/devices, there are of course limited resources for big giveaways. We are relying on your donations towards the Community Prize Fund.

Entry is free. If there are any questions we have a discussion thread for the competition at http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=96268

If you are new to the Maemo community, please feel free to check out our introduction page to learn more about us.

Thanks for your interest in taking part, we can't wait to see what you'll develop! :)

(NB: The final details are still being ironed out, so the below is subject to change. Keep watching this space!)

Devices & Platforms

• Maemo
  • Includes all Maemo devices and MeeGo Harmattan devices.
• Mer-based
  • Includes all Mer-based devices. E.g. SailfishOS, NemoMobile, AsteroidOS etc.

Categories

The 3 categories:

• Something new
  • In this category all new creations, for example applications, device ports, cross-platform, any kind hacks, and et cetera, are viable.
• Fixing/Updating
  • Anykind of fixes, updates, backporting, exploiting/reverse engineering closed packages in to this category.
• Beginners
  • First contribution

Of course these are not strict categories. So if your developments doesn't seem to fit any category, submit the entry and we will fit it.

Competition Timeline

The competition is currently scheduled to accept submissions for 3 months, starting on Monday X November 2016 and ending on Monday X January 2016. Competition entries must be submitted by 12 midnight on Sunday X January(UTC time). Voting will run from February X through February X 2016, 23:59 UTC.

How to Submit an Entry

To enter, you can submit your entry via one of two ways - the thread in TMO available at [1] (or by emailing directly to the email address maemo-community<*at*>maemo<*dot*>org?). You will also align your entry to one of the judging categories[2] at that time. in addition, you will also need to provide some details for the judging thread, including 2 screenshots, a brief description of your entry, and an outline of what work you personally completed on it.

It would be appreciated if entries would also be posted to openrepos.net[3].

Only entries received via TMO thread (or emailed directly to the competition email address?) will be counted as valid entries in the competition. New participants are welcome to join at any time up until the closing date.

• Project Name:
• Author:
• Brief description:
• Screenshot(s):
• Features/work to be judged:
• Package name and where to find the app/repository:
• talk.maemo.org thread(if exists):

Prizes

Fun at coding and learning new!

• Something new
• Fixing/Updating
• Beginners

Donations for the Community Prize Fund

The following list shows all of the donations and pledges made to the community prize fund so far. There is no fixed amount - all donations are very welcome!

Please mark your donation as Competition Reward or it will not be bound to the Competition and taken as random donation!

Monetary donation methods and information can be found from here: [4]. Please use direct SEPA wire if applicable.

Please don't forget to include your maemo.org username in the transfer message to be mentioned in the following list. If no maemo.org username is included, the donation will be marked as anonymous. You can find more information on the donation paypal process (with screenshots) on this post

Monetary donations will be converted to physical prizes. There will be no refunding of any such donation. Donations not marked as Competition Rewards will be taken as random donations and are not bound to the Competition or any future competition.

Physical donations are just the same; if they are not shipped clearly marked as Competition Rewards Donation, they become property of MCeV and are not bound to be taken as Rewards for the Competition or any future competition.

Funds and hardware, not directed towards the competition fond, may be used to support future developers on special tasks e.g. given out as Developer Loaner.

Our special thanks to the following people for their generous contributions:

Participants

The final list of participants for voting is available at http://talk.maemo.org

And you can see the application submissions listed by category on forum posts via the links below:

• Something new []

• Fixing/Updating []

• Beginners []

The below table displays the submission details, as received, for each entry. (The table is currently in process of being updated with the final details.)

Rules

To ensure that the event runs properly, there are a few essential rules:

• Only individuals may participate. Companies are excluded from the competition because of equity reasons.

• If you have coded your app in a team and you win one of the prizes, your team has to designate one person as the winner.

• Any number of apps can be submitted and elected as winners but, as communally agreed, there will be one prize per developer.

• Entries must be available as executable or equivalent and your entry should include at least two screen shots/pictures and a brief description to take part in the election. Entries have to run on Maemo or Mer-based devices/platforms. Device ports have to work on informed hardware.

• All applications, which are created and uploaded during the duration of the competition and do not violate any laws or copyright will take part in the election.

• A new application, in the context of the competition, is one which has not been previously developed for the Maemo or Mer-based platform.

• Ported applications are welcome, however only the work of porting will be considered (unless the original program is from the same developer and was developed or extended within the competition timeframe). These entries should include a description of work done during the porting process to enable the application to run on the platform.

• Already released software must have a substantial upgrade from previous releases to qualify for entry to the 'Update' category. These entries should also include a list of changes the author has made to the previous version.

• Coding competition entries marked as beginner will also automatically be entered into the beginners contest if they meet the following criteria: entries to the beginners competition should be the authors first released coding project(s) for the Maemo or Mer-based platforms, and must have been first released between the competition start and end dates.

• Entries that are not stand alone software will have to include any libraries or files required to run, or they should be easily available via the normal repositories. Clear instructions will have to be provided. In the case of interpreters and emulators copyrighted files should not be included.

• There will be a feature freeze on entries during the voting stage of the competition. Please limit your code changes to bug fix only for any competition entry release during this period, and this restriction should remain until the end of the vote.

• Only users of maemo.org who are registered at the start of the competition and have at least 10 karma at the time of voting are entitled to vote.

• There is no legal right to win.

Voting

Voting will run from November X through November X 2016, 23:59 UTC

The voting frontend, the webinterface via which you enter your vote, is the same as for the Maemo Council elections. So you can establish an order among the participating applications indicating your preferences. Thereby, the first choice has the most impact. With following choices the impact gets less and less. The last choice has the least impact. Every voter has one vote / category.

Counting Votes

After the voting period has finished the votes are counted. The ranking order of participants is determined based on all valid votes.

The tool used for counting the votes is OpenSTV. We use OpenSTV version 1.6.1-1 which can be publicly downloaded from http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/openstv . The openstv executable used is extracted from the *.deb package.

For each category, the ranking of candiates is determined individually.

As general "vote counting system" Fractional Transfer Single Transferable Vote (FTSTV) is used. FTSTV, however, does not provide a way for determining the order of participants out of the box.

For determining the ranking among the participating applications the following approach is used:

• The winner is determined by running OpenSTV for one seat.
• Subsequently, the second place is determined by running OpenSTV for two seats. Thereby, the winner from step 1 plus another participant will be elected. The newly added/elected participant is placed second.
• For determining the third place, OpenSTV is run for three seats. The newly added/elected participant takes the third place.
• This process is repeated until the number of seats reaches n-1 with n being the number of participants. The remaining participant not being added or elected yet takes the last place.

For automating this counting process the following script is used

election=$1

tail -n 1 $election | sed 's/"//g'

>/tmp/result
for i in $(seq $(expr $(head -c 2 $election) - 1))
do
  openstv-run-election -r CsvReport -s $i FTSTV $election \
    | awk -F, '/Elected/ { print $1 }' \
    | while read w
        do if ! grep -q "$w" /tmp/result
          then
            echo $w >> /tmp/result
            break
          fi
        done
done
awk 'BEGIN { i = 1; } { print i, $0; i++; }' /tmp/result | sed 's/"//g'

This script should be saved to a file named "results" and can be called as follows:

for i in *.blt; do sh results $i; done

Assuming the script + openstv-run-election are in the same directory as the result files (the *.blt files) for all categories and the current directory is this directory, this way of calling the script will perform the counting for all categories. The only thing that may be changed in the above script is the passage "openstv-run-election" for adding a proper path to the actual location of the OpenSTV executable, e.g., to point to "/usr/bin/openstv-run-election". Aside from this exception the script must not be changed at all.

However it is still possible to also do the vote counting manually using the described process. Vote counting process, OpenSTV version used, and counting script are all publicly available so everyone can perform the voting and verify the final official results.

App Developer Resources

Getting started with Maemo application development

##TODO

The Nokia Qt SDK is the official set of tools with everything needed to design and create applications for the N900. The development wiki is a great place to start, it contains lots of code examples and development guides. The "Windows Python and Qt in 30 mins" thread is a great PyQt tutorial for beginners and will have you coding your first app in minutes, and here's a tutorial from Linuxuser.co.uk.

The 'Developer' forum on maemo.org is an excellent resource to find answers and ask questions of your own.

FAQ

Spreading the word

Q: Which Twitter Hashtag to use for this Competition?

A: Please use #mccXVI

Application requirements

Q: It is obligatory to code in Qt?

A: No, it isn't, but it would make your life probably a lot easier because you will be able to reach more platforms. We encourage everyone to use Qt.

Q: It is obligatory to open source the code?

A: No, it isn't, but it highly encouraged. Community tends to give better votes for open sourced entry.

App/Application submission process

Q: Where to submit my application?

A: You can enter your application via talk.maemo.org thread available at http://talk.maemo.org or by emailing your application to maemo-community<*at*>maemo<*dot*>org directly.

Q: Who selects the category of the application?

Will the developers select the category when they join the competition or will someone sort it into the correct category before the voting begins?

A: They will choose the category for their app, but everyone should keep an eye on that. Before the voting process starts we'll check if every app is in a reasonable category, so that it is not possible to cheat by choosing the category with the lowest competition.

Wishlist

If you would like to have an App, a Port, a Fix, a Hack or etc. but you can't code yourself, write it down here! Many devs are happy to get a new idea input. (Rom Manager was a proposal from year 2011).

Discussion

Please participate in the discussion at talk.maemo.org

Contact

You still have questions? Contact us!

• @maemo_council in Twitter
• maemo-community<*at*>maemo<*dot*>org
• eekkelund in TMO,TJC,IRC,Telegram and Twitter

Previous competitions

• Maemo Coding Competiton 1
• MeeGo Coding Competition 2011
• Maemo.org Coding Competition 2012

Events