Mini-Sprint in Rome?

Dear all,

you might already know that Jodok is organising a Snow-Sprint in 
Vorarlberg which hopefully could take place at the end of January. We 
cancelled the idea to have an official second part of the sprint here 
in Rome because it would altogether last too long and be to difficult 
to organise travels from the first place to the second and then back ...

But, what would you think about having an additional "little" sprint in 
Rome though? The aim would be to build a project like we planned to do 
with "ZUCCARO" (http://zuccaro.biblhertz.it:8080/ZUCCARO - still only 
in German, sorry ...) based on Ticle - which seems to be able to 
support a lot of our ideas "out of the box". Of course, this "tool-box" 
would be used for our special purposes at first, but it is intended to 
be usable for other projects (Online-Databases in the humanities and 
social or historical sciences with Content Management functions) as 
well - but I could imagine also the usage of this for very different 
(commercial?) projects:
As far as I understand it, Ticle "out of the box" is a very abstract 
thing, not intended to serve for the ad-hoc creation of projects like 
the one it was made for (by Neonex and Simon) in the beginning. 
Therefore, to have an easy costumizable (via XML Schemas) tool-box 
based on Ticle that would be "closer" to the needs of any project could 
serve not only as a showcase, but used widely in (hopefully: very) 
different other projects, especially in the "non-market" of 
low-financed research, education and so on, but also in free projects 
or (not only) small commercial environments.
One purpose (of our ZUCCARO - and therefore, of this "Ticle based 
tool-box" too) is to migrate the HIDA/MIDAS-Databases used by many 
(about 40-50) foto/picture archives not only in Germany to a free 
solution: the commercial one just got into the trap of closed source 
software - the company disappeared, and no-one can say what will happen 
with all these databases in a few years when the institutions have to 
switch to the next generation of Windows ... :-)

I'm sure everybody has a lot to do beside programming for 
Zope/Plone/Ticle --- and creating a more "customized" tool-set based on 
Ticle might sound like work that should be done by a Zope company 
within a clearly defined project for "real money".
(Frankly spoken: Our problem is: We don't have that money - we could 
apply to get some from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche 
Forschungsgemeinschaft = DFG) --- but the bureaucratic way takes at 
least 6 months, and because of limited contracts (for instance: mine) 
our time is to short to try this way - which might fail anyway ...)

So, please let me know if and who of you could imagine to stay in Rome 
(for instance, in the second half of February) for a week and work on 
this tool-box I would like to see as a widely usable Ticle showcase ...

Greets from the Eternal City :-)

Bernd

PS: I leave for Berlin today and be there for a week (EVA 2003 
conference), so I might not be able to check my e-mail more than once a 
day. 



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