Bringing the RapidPro Tech Development Community Together
RapidCon 2016 connected vendors and partners with the UNICEF Global Innovation Centre
RapidCon is a conference that brings together technology vendors and partners with the UNICEF Global Innovation Centre to discuss the technical evolution of RapidPro's architecture. RapidCon provides a way to orient new vendors on LTAs (long-term agreements for services) to the RapidPro ecosystem and to identify vendor strengths, interests, and opportunities to engage with RapidPro and related products.
Since last year’s RapidCon, there have been over 800 pull requests which correspond to new features, performance and bug fixes, and about 95% test coverage. An additional 12 vendors are on LTAs for software development services.
This year’s conference took place in Amsterdam after the Django Under the Hood conference, which many vendors, suppliers, and partners were already planning to attend.
24 participants representing 11 companies participated in this year’s RapidCon including a mix of RapidPro experts and developers who were new to the platform. The conference opened with overviews of various products and platforms (RapidPro, CasePro, TracPro, Surveyor, U-Report public website, U-Report smartphone apps, the U-Report data warehouse project, Vumi, Junebug, Aldryn), to sharing projects such as the USAID flow interoperability and tools used like UNICEF’s eTools.
Additionally, plenary discussions included versioning, cloud and local hosting, the community, and postgres scaling while also having break-out sessions held on GCM/Firebase channel for RapidPro, CasePro, and primitives/ multimedia messaging.
Outcomes from RapidCon
- A Firebase channel for RapidPro
- A new repository (https://github.com/rapidpro/rapidpro-docker) maintained by the open source community that builds docker images versioned off of git tags published in https://github.com/nyaruka/rapidpro and uploads them to Docker Hub. With Docker, it will be easier to people to deploy locally hosted versions of RapidPro.
- Identified and scoped work on the additional development of TracPro and CasePro
