Sandro talked about his terrific implementation for making one of the first (I'm sure, but can't proof it ..) fully accessible Flash games out there. It got the highest rating by Access for all and they blogged about it.

Unfortunately Sandro can't make his presentation available (his slides engine doesn't have an export function (yet)), but it was basically what he wrote in his 2 blog posts here on this blog. So read Post 1 and Post 2 to get all the information you need.

By the way, the game can be found at http://www.postfinance-eventmanager.ch/

Memi talked about the challenges in Management of medium and large size projects. It's not all that obvious and some eye-opening stuff for the not so experienced in project management people was in there. Less techie than the other talks, but important for successfull technology projects even more so. Get his slides.

September last year I met up with an old room mate. She told me about a student project called Making Commitments Matter (MCM). They had created a database for UN resolutions. Even though the team was quite large, spanning all across Europe, they didn't have anyone in the group who had a sufficient level of IT know how to bring it all online. Once again it shows that Universities usually are unable to bring together different departments. So I had no choice but to help them out!

Step one defining a database schema for the excel files they currently used to store the information. Contrary to the document systems of the various UN organizations which scatter the various PDF's across different sites, the aim of resolutionfinder.org (previously called UN-informed.org) is to bring all information to one database. Furthermore resolutionfinder.org would also show the entire history of documents and each of the clauses there in. This again is a huge leap forward, since right now its essentially impossible to determine if a given document or clause is actually the most current version and how things changed over time. Especially this history was a big challenge in the definition of the schema.

Aside from this the two years that MCM spend interviewing key stakeholders like NGO's, government officials and researchers have lead to a fairly complex set of additional attributes that also need to be stored for each document and clause. The fact that each clause is stored separately is also a key improvement since many documents contain decisions on many different topics. With this database it will be possible to search for just the clauses for a given area as both documents and individual clauses are tagged.

Using the admin generator of the symfony PHP framework I started building up an interface to the database in order to be able to get feedback from the MCM team. By way of a call for help on my blog Dennis Riedel, living in Barcelona, joined the effort and began working on an import tool to move the data from the excel files into the database schema. At a project meeting in Helsinki in early December 2009, we used this prototype to define the final specifications for the database.

The goal was to have a working frontend ready for the conference MCM was organizing on the topic of "UN information management" end of May 2010. No small undertaking for a small team of two guys in their spare time, neither of whom being real experts in frontend development. So I turned to Liip for help. At Liip we have budgets to support technically or socially relevant efforts. The process is basically pitching the idea to the entire team to get development resources. In the end resolutionfinder.org was allocated 12 man days development as well as 1 man day for server administration and a server to run the application on!

Christoph and Jordi both stepped up on short notice to help me build up a frontend that actually exceeded by far the hopes of the MCM team. The site leverages Apache Solr for the search with features boolean operators and facette filtering. We display the documents, clauses as well as their relation and history. Its also possible to register to store bookmarks to documents and clauses as well as comment them. Most amazingly we still have a few days of development left that we will use to further optimize the UX on the search interface. I should also thank Stefan Sicher who delivered a very sleek and clean design just days before the conference.

Obviously there is still lots left to do. As mentioned before we want to further improve the UX on the search. We are also considering adding alternative search approaches, for example some people might want to search chronologically, others organization etc. We also want to add data mining capabilities so that we can automatically import voting records and maybe eventually even entire documents. Supporting more languages both for the interface and the content also is high on our list. We might also provide the content via an RDF database to enable others to come up with queries of their own. The team is obviously full of ideas and is actively looking for companies or developers willing to donate resources. The source code of the entire application is of course open source: patches welcome!

Here is an example search for "security council" documents, for regional education topics outside of africa. Here is an example document and example clause with a history on the topic of malaria. Additional information on the technology can be found in the case studies publised as Lucid Imagination and symfony. I also published a series of posts on my personal blog. Overall it was a very fun and rewarding experience and obviously I will continue to work on the project in my spare time. For Liip I can already see how several of the lessons learned during the project have paid off on client projects as well. So overall I guess its a win for all!

Bart, one of our newest Liipers, made a talk about oEmbed. Even though the technology exists since quite some time, not many Liipers knew of it. So we all learned something here. Get his slides.

Pierre talked about the PhoneGap work we did for an unpuplished project. He also talked a lot about JavaScript in general and some concepts there. Actually, it's more about JavaScript, than PhoneGap. But that was fine and very interesting and entertaining (most of the fun is missing in the 99 slides, but there are still some gems). Get his slides.

Jordi talked about the Top 10 Security Issues by OWASP as a little refresher for everyone (the in-depth stuff is happening in a "quartalsworkshop" soon). Here are his slides

Last Wednesday, Liip had its traditional Techday, where everyone gathers together (not only the techies) and listens to talks mainly done by Liipers. And then there's BBQ with swimming in the lake, afterwards (badly needed at these temperatures).

This year we went to the Hotel Schlössli in Ipsach with in total seven very interesting talks, which we will publish one a day now on this very blog.

Today we start with Penny's Moodle 2.0 talk. We got very interesting insights in what's new and where Moodle may be heading in the future. Go and see her slides.

Thanks a lot to everyone involved in organising the Techday. And if you want to see some (too many) pictures from the whole event, see my flickr set. Live "flickered" with one of those fun eye-fi SD cards.

Our newest employee, Bastian Feder starts at Liip in July. He's moving to Zurich from Cologne and needs of course a place to stay. But we were not lucky until now in finding something, therefore:

If you know of/have a flat/room available from July (or earlier) to rent, please tell me or Bastian (via comments or mail or twitter). The nearer to our Zurich Office, the better, but apart from that we don't have many other requirements. It can even be temporary or just a room somewhere. We just want to avoid that he has to commute from Cologne to work :)

Thanks for any hints already.

After 5 fun, insightful and horizon-broadening weeks as an intern at Liip Fribourg, I’d like to share with you a brief review of my experiences. In 5 weeks a lot can happen, you meet new people, get to know their behaviors and expectations, get to know new technologies, improve skills in technologies you already knew, get to know new methods of project management and try to apply them yourself, you work (duh), and also end up doing a lot of fun stuff on the side! I’ll try to cover all of these areas as best I can.

People
My first impression couldn't have been better. Gerhard introduced me to the entire staff  on my first visit shortly before my internship started. The open and friendly impression I received was confirmed during my first week of work where I immediately noticed the open, collaborative and dynamic nature of my nearly trilingual team. German-speaking lunches, occasional movie nights in the office and drinks after work on Fridays completed this image. I was impressed at the high level of skills I saw in my team. From the beginning, I had the general impression that I was working with smart, motivated, skilled and experienced people and it was a pleasure learning from them.

New Technologies
From what I could tell, the technologies used on the projects were state of the art in web technologies and favored open-source software, consistent with Liips philosophy. Working with the symfony framework and learning some advanced JavaScript techniques from Pierre were only some of the highlights among the new things I learned during that time. However, learning about new technologies was not limited to interns, but is rather part of a conscious effort of the company as such to keep evolving with the technologies in this field. Weekly internal tech-talks in the morning and monthly external web Tuesdays in the evenings offer the staff a constant exposure to the latest trends and favor discussion between the teams, which often continues via the many online communication channels active at all time within the company.

Project management
The project management methodology was new to me as well, as L//P subscribes to an agile web development method called Scrum. There are a few things I immediately liked about this method and that I would consider best-practices: strong collaboration within the team, daily exchange on how the project is progressing, visual charts that show at all times where the team stands in their work, weekly review and planning meetings, of which I especially appreciated the “retrospective” meeting, a time to learn from mistakes, express concerns and find ways to improve these points in the future! This along with an obvious effort of the management team to keep in touch with how things were going for me made it a very pleasant experience.

Work
My work was varied and always interesting. Although as an intern a lot of time is spent getting to know the current project of one’s team, I am proud to have been able to do real work throughout my internship. At the same time, I had more freedom and less pressure than the others, which allowed me to really take advantage of what I was learning and go in-depth in some areas I probably could not have afforded to if under the same time-constraints as my colleagues. 
Finally, I shouldn’t forget to mention that the new office really is great. Both its central location and stylish, open-space design make it a pleasure to work there.

Summing it up: As you can tell, I very much enjoyed my time at Liip. It is a young, dynamic, challenging environment for bright minds to be productive and is without a doubt a great place to work.

Christopher Dickinson

On the 25th and 25th March, Adrian Schlegel and Penny Leach attended the German Moodlemoot in Berlin.

Penny's Experience

This was my 7th or 8th Moodlemoot, so for me the most important part was seeing other Moodlers again and catching up with what they're doing. I didn't go to many of the talks, since it stretches my German somewhat, but I very much enjoyed Ralf Hilgenstock's keynote address, including some interesting photos of Moodlers and a preview of Moodle 2.0.

Officially, during the conference, I co-led a talk and workshop with about Mahara which went very well - at the end of our workshop we had attendees doing a demonstration of the presentations they created about what they had learned during the course of the Moodlemoot, which was great to see, from people who had never used Mahara before.

 I also did a handover of MNet to David Mudrak. I was working on MNet during my secondment to Moodle HQ in January and February, but I can't really maintain it as actively as I need when back in my normal life, and David volunteered while we were at the Moodle developer conference last December in the Czech Republic.

Finally, of course we upheld the fine Moodlemoot tradition of Mojito drinking. This has been a tradition as long as I remember, and apparently I am partially to blame for inroducing Martin Dougiamas, Moodle's founder, to Mojitos many years ago.

Thanks very much Liip for giving me the time to go to this conference, and of course the organisers for a stellar job.

Adi's Experience

The MoodleMoot in Berlin was my first MoodleMoot so it was quite a different experience for me.
I really liked Ralf Hilgenstock's (eledia.de) Keynote on Moodle 2.0. It provided a nice overview over the upcoming features of Moodle 2.0.
The interesting thing about MoodleMoots is that most of the participants are teachers/people from educational institutions.
Although you will meet the occasional core developer it's mostly an end user conference. This means you meet a lot of people that are confronted with Moodle in their day-to-day life. What struck me most was the amount of enthusiasm these people are showing for Moodle. I had a lot of conversations with other attendees and I was suprised to see how much effort they put into advocating Moodle. Apparently in Germany it's quite hard to introduce new tools into the class rooms due to a lot of bureaucracy. Still those people fight for Moodle until it gets accepted by superiors and pupils.

A lot of the talks at the MoodleMoot were from teachers sharing their experiences in adapting Moodle to their specific needs. Even though most of them do not really have any programming experience they manage to adapt Moodle to their needs.

It was also interesting to meet some of the core developers (David Mudrak and Petr Škoda) and being introduced to the MoodleMoot Mojito tradition.

From a developer point of view I can highly recommend taking part in a MoodleMoot because you get to see how people use Moodle in real life to get the most out of it.