It is time for an update!

First, the September 17th hackathon – from our perspective, the hackathon was a great success. We had 13 participants come and design us a model of the possible technical infrastructure of EPL’s local music project. It took three hours of focus, some pizza and some very smart minds! Check out what we came up with -

What did we learn? As some participants probably suspected, we learned that building the site we want with the functionality we want was outside of EPL’s existing staff resources – at least if we want to finish it in 2015. The hackathon gave us the big picture of our project’s development and showed us that we need to look outside the library for help.

With impeccable timing, we were approached by the Rabble: a new company created to provide public libraries with the infrastructure for a digital local music collection (find them on twitter and Facebook). We are very excited to be partnering with the Rabble to build our first digital public space. Our web developers will be collaborating with Rabble to build a space that is unique for Edmonton and that responds to the recommendations and interests expressed at YEG BandCamp and other events. Right now we’re working towards a launch in April 2015!

This project is committed to open source development. Once the site is built, Rabble will open up all of the code we have developed together on GitHub making it accessible to all and keeping the public in digital public space.  

Thank you to everyone who came out to the hackathon to help give us direction and special thanks to Yellow Pencil and Startup Edmonton for their support.