I'm pleased to announce we've hired Gary Moore as the lead developer for the ATHENA Tix project. You can reach him at Fractured Atlas or through the mailing lists.

Welcome Gary.

Welcome to the new ATHENA Tix website. In addition to a stylish new design (OK, the stock Open Atrium theme), we have a lot more content. In particular, check out the documents section under the ATHENA Tix group.

Please Note: Those of you with user accounts on the old system will have to re-register here. Apologies. Also, going forward user registrations will be moderated. As with the mailing lists, we got some spam on the site.

Please let us know what you think.

ATHENA Tix is hiring!

We need two motivated developers to work (mainly) out of our DC office and provide the core work for ATHENA Tix. Last week we posted this position to a bunch of jobs sites. If it has not gotten to you yet and you are interested, please let us know.

POSTING: Become the heart of an open source project and help transform the way artists and arts organizations do business.

Fractured Atlas, a national not-for-profit arts services company (http://www.fracturedatlas.org) is developing a state-of-the-art, open source event ticketing system: ATHENA Tix. We are designing this system from the ground up to employ the latest technologies, techniques and ideas in an effort to create a system that lets artists and organizations sell tickets the way they want to. With generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, we are developing this system under open source and creative commons licenses.

Our mandate is to create a highly configurable, service-oriented, J2EE application with modern web interfaces. How we get there is as much up to you as it is to us. We want smart, creative Java developers who are interested in getting in on the ground floor of designing a new system. We want people who can help us find out which tools are right and which techniques work and can tell us why. We want people with crazy good ideas about how the system should work and how people should interact with it. We want people who are interested by this project.

Requirements follow. Interested parties should email a cover letter with resume and salary requirements to justin.karr@fracturedatlas.org.

Technical Requirements:
* Expertise with J2EE and J2EE web-facing technologies specifically.
* Comfort with core supporting technologies including Java, HTML, Javascript, SQL and XML.
* Familiarity with specific J2EE technologies including Struts, Spring and Hibernate.
* Familiarity with specific web-based technologies including jQuery and the Google Web Toolkit.
* Comfort administering a development environment and systems (it will be a small shop to start) and using both Windows and UNIX-like operating systems.
* Solid understanding of underlying software development methodologies, including object-oriented design and service-oriented architecture.

Other Requirements:
* Willingness to work on a small team and on an Agile-ish development process.
* Willingness to work in Washington DC or the immediate environs.
* Willingness to participate in an open source community around the project.
* Basic conceptual familiarity with the subject matter: selling tickets to live events.
* Identifiable successfully delivered projects.
* Excellent references and recommendations.

Bonus Points:
* Specific desire in and/or experience with working on an Open Source project.
* An interest in the subject matter: event ticketing.
* Exposure to the Kuali project (http://www.kuali.org).
* Leadership experience (even if outside of software development.

Folks,

We have created yet another mailing list. This one, ATHENA Tix Developers - athena-tix-devel@googlegroups.com - is intended to focus on the technical side of ATHENA Tix. The talk on the Planners list got pretty technical pretty quickly and we want to make sure we do not put off those people who care more about what we do and not how we do it. As the project develops, this devel mailing list will become the place where developers and interested parties discuss specific development-related issues. In the meantime, we will use it for technical feature requests (must support DB2, XML-RPC and AIX) and discussion about implementation.

So join up, and going forward, please use the Planners list (athena-tix-planning) for non-technical discussions and the Developers list (athena-tix-devel) for technical discussions.

Many thanks,

Justin

The ATHENA Tix planning and design process now has a mailing list. We have created "ATHENA Tix Planners" over at Google Groups: athena-tix-planning@googlegroups.com. It is a public list. Please sign up if you are interested.

Thanks mainly to all of the very smart participants who showed up, ATHENA Tix Community Design Session 1 was a success. The Program in Research in Information Technology's own Chris Mackie moderated three excellent business process analysis sessions and a wishlist/v1.0 requirements session. The output of these sessions has given us a lot of great material to start work with. Over the next few days, we will digitize and sort this material and post it here.

Following a model used by the Program in Research in Information Technology at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation we are assembling a group of experts in the field and potential users and having them work through an exercise to help us develop the business requirements for the ATHENA Tix system. This exercise entails identifying business processes (like, validating a ticket at the venue) and creating a specific form of workflow from it.

Do you want:

• A ticketing system that sells tickets exactly the way your organization wants to sell tickets?
• A ticketing system built on the latest and greatest technologies and software methodologies?
• A ticketing system that integrates with all of the other systems you already have (or might want to get)?
• A ticketing system that makes it easy to try new things?

Would you:

• Be willing to spend work hours instead of dollars to get such a system?
• Be willing to collaborate with other arts organizations to make it happen?
• Be willing to share your best ideas and your best