So in case you haven’t heard, registration for the 2009 event opens next week. That means that it’s time to start talking ideas and finding teammates.

Don’t have an idea yet? How about this one: you could build a web app to organize Rumble web app ideas and help people find teammates!

Oh wait, someone already did that.

Say hello to rumblestiltskin, a small Rumble idea organizer created by Dan Croak of Thoughtbot. At the site, you can browse a list of ideas, submit your own, and find potential teammates, too. Check it out; there are already some pretty quality microapp ideas listed there.

We’re actively seeking sponsors for the 2009 competition. Sponsor money is used to purchase prizes for winners, and to offset the other costs of running the competition. This year we’ve created a tiered sponsorship system, with a limited number of sponsored spots available at each level. Supporting the Rumble is a great way to help promote entrepreneurship in the Ruby community. It also allows you to get your company brand, products, and services in front of not just the developer community but also the far larger startup enthusiast and web consumer demographics.

Make sure to check out our current roster of sponsors, including our infrastructure partners Linode and GitHub, as well as our friends at Thoughtbot (3-time sponsor of the much-loved Rumble championship belt!), Hashrocket, Intridea, RailsKits, TechStars, Spreedly, and Rails Forum.

We’ve been overwhelmed by all the support thus far and only have two spots remaining at the “heavyweight” level (but many opportunities at the middleweight and lightweight levels). Please contact Erin Shine if you’re interested in learning more about sponsorship options.

So we’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front since Railsconf, but rest assured, the rusty gears are indeed turning here at Rails Rumble HQ. Things have been slowly ramping up over the past couple weeks, and organizers have been actively engaging with the community on the discussion list.

As I’m sure you already know from the teaser page, the competition weekend is August 22nd – 23rd this year. We’ll be opening registration for contestants early next week if all goes as planned. It’ll be announced here as soon as it’s live, so subscribe to our feed if you haven’t already done so, and we’ll be sure to keep you up to date.

In the meantime, I thought I’d drop a quick status update and let you know about some changes that are in store for the contest this year.

The first thing, obviously, is that we’ve got some brand new threads for the site. What do you think? The design this year was done by our friend Zach Inglis (with illustration / robot battle logo created by yours truly), and cut up by Jeff and Erin. I’m really happy with how it came out, and we hope you like it too.

The registration process for teams this year is going to be pretty much the same as it was before. The one difference is that a (very small) mandatory donation will be required if you wish to participate as a contestant (one donation per team). The reason for this is to better qualify participants; our infrastructure partners at Linode and GitHub have to reserve resources for each team and in the past we’ve had some issues with people signing up and failing to compete. At least this way, we lessen the chances of that happening and at the same time can collect some small amounts of money to go to a good cause. You’ll be able to choose the cause you want to donate to as well; at the moment the choices are either the RailsBridge project or the Rails Rumble organizational team (that’s us!)

Lastly and most importantly, the voting process is going to be changed up and streamlined this year. We’ll be using a panel of industry experts to pre-qualify applications, and a smaller number of the best of the best will go on to open public voting. Our experts will represent a cross-section of industry folks with experience in startups, community building, design, and development. Each of your web apps will be rated by three of them, and each vote will be accompanied by a comment from the expert noting at least one thing that they really liked, or one way you could improve your app in the future, etc.

The public voting period will last 2-3 days, and be open to anyone. Our belief is that by limiting voting options, we’ll attract more casual web users to the best-of-competition apps, and by combining expert and public scores, we’ll lessen the impact of any ballot stuffing activities that might occur and increase the quality of voter feedback. For more details, see the hybrid voting system discussion on the mailing list.

Thanks for listening — you’ll be hearing more from us real soon!

If you’ve been paying attention over the last couple of days, you probably noticed that the old Rails Rumble 2008 competition site (archived) has been replaced with a teaser for the upcoming 2009 event. More info on that soon. Promise.

In the meantime, you can join the announcements list or check out the new discussion list that we just set up (if you were previously subscribed to the 2008 alerts list, you will be getting an email invite to the new announcements list shortly). Oh and make sure to stalk us on Twitter. Ttys.

Railsconf is less than two weeks away. I’m pretty excited because this year we’re doing a Rails Rumble panel with a bunch of swell people who developed some pretty amazing things within the compressed event timeframe. Winners and other innovators from both the 2007 and 2008 events will be present. The session is called “Starting Up Fast: Lessons from the Rails Rumble” and the point of it is that these guys will be sharing the tips and tricks that let them build great stuff quick with Rails. Hopefully their advice will be applicable to your own startups and hobby projects, in “real life” as well as within the innovation competition atmosphere.

So this is where we need your help. What do you want to ask them about? Project scoping for early and frequent iterations? Essential dev tools and techniques? Finding dependable partners / cofounders? General work habit questions? Inspirational mantras? Anything goes. Please submit your questions via Google Moderator. The event will be recorded and made available afterwards, so you won’t have to be in attendance to get your answers.

I’m happy to report that our panel, ‘Starting Up Fast: Lessons from the Rails Rumble’, has been accepted for the 4th annual Railsconf event in Las Vegas.

I’ll be moderating a panel of competition winners and participants, and we’ll be discussing how they were able to achieve some impressive feats in the compressed contest timeframe. It should be packed full of useful real-world advice on how to organize and launch Rails applications quickly. We’ll also talk about the event itself, and the nature of innovation competitions in general (and why you should get involved!)

Panelists include our friends Joe Fiorini (grand prize winner 2008), Josh Owens (grand prizer winner 2007, design award 2008), Ben Scofield (winner, solo division for both 2007 and 2008), James Golick (winner, most useful 2008), and Darcy Laycock, who participated in the 2007 contest and joined the organizational team for the 2008 event.

So if you’re making the voyage to the City of Sin in May, make sure to check us out. I’m excited, and it’ll be great to meet many of you there!

Last years Rumble winners, MeetInBetween.Us, was very recently featured on their local TV station, WSEE. Check it out below and congratulations to the team!

Ivan Schneider emailed us a while back to let us know that his team had decided to open-source their Rumble app, rbDB. A serious contender for the ‘most useful’ category this year, rbDB is a web-based database administration tool similar to the popular phpMyAdmin package. Its developers are still actively working on improving the codebase (currently tagged as an alpha), but you can check it out for yourself and contribute at rbDB’s GitHub project page.

If other Rumble participants have also decided to open-source their apps, let us know, and we’ll be happy to help spread the word!

The post-Rumble press coverage continues! Julie Bort has written up a nice showcase/slideshow featuring the 2008 competition winners and some of her other personal favorites over at Network World. Check it out, and, if you like it, digg it.

Rumble Teams! Now that the competition is over, we hope you continue to polish and expand your entries. If you choose to do so, there are a few housecleaning tasks and things you should know to continue development.

• The embargo on pushing code to your deployment is over. Any bug fixes, new features, etc. — fair game for deployment now.
• The virtual private servers provided for the Rails Rumble by Linode will be shut down on November 16th. To continue using your VPS, you need to make arrangements with Linode. See below.
• The GitHub accounts supplied to each team will also be reclaimed. You should migrate your source code to your own GitHub account or other source control. The date Rumble accounts supplied by GitHub are to be reclaimed is yet to be determined, but we recommend you do this before November 30th.
• If you would like your team's r08.railsrumble.com subdomain to resolve to a new IP address or domain, just send us an email. We recommend you register your own domain and configure your webserver to do a 301 (Moved Permanently) redirect on the r08.railsrumble.com subdomain — your page rank will thank you.

Finally, if you are planning to open source your app, please send us an email at organizers (at) railsrumble (dawt) com. We're going to be publishing a post on open sourced rumble apps in the coming weeks.

Keeping Your Linode

Linode is offering two months free following one paid month on any of their hosting plans until December 31st for all of the Rumble teams. To take advantage of this promotion and keep your app hosted at Linode, you have to do one of two things:

• Open a Linode support ticket from your Rails Rumble account and ask to be "converted" to the plan of your choice. You can do this until November 16th.
• Sign up as a new customer and use the promotion code found in the "Special Offers" area of your user profile on the Rails Rumble site. The promotion code is valid until December 31st.

If you have already signed up for a Linode but have not received the promotional offer, open a support ticket to request the credit.

This year we decided to select 5 random judges (out of over 2000!) to receive a small token of our appreciation for participating in the selection process. Say hello to the following lucky winners:

• Maggie Longshore
• Kivanio Barbosa
• Jeremy Dernison
• Edward Waller
• Chris Jones

Each of them will receive a $20 Amazon.com gift certificate, courtesy of Ubikorp. Thanks for helping us whittle down the list of entries, guys. And thanks to all the other judges too. We couldn’t have done this without your help!

Ladies and gentlemen, the results of the 2008 Rails Rumble competition are in!

Overall Winners:

1. Great Lakes Geeks for Meet In Between
2. Scatapult for Qflip
3. New Media Logic for Riverdex

Category Winners:

• Appearance: Team Handcrafted for Jot.ly
• Completeness: The Loose Knuckles for TrackClass
• Innovation: The Verbose for So2Speak
• Usefulness: Team GiraffeSoft for What Does this Error Mean?
• Solo Team: Leaf on the Wind for Forever Home

We’d like to thank all the participants who labored to build such great applications throughout the duration of the contest. Whether they finished or not, and whether they ranked at the top of the leaderboard or not, everyone did fantastic work. Last year we selected a number of entries for honorable mentions. This year we’re not doing that because there are simply too many to list. Totally serious.

Many thanks to all the additional voters that joined us to help judge entries. We had a truly great turnout this year. Stay tuned to this blog, where we’ll be posting winners of the randomly selected judging prizes and more in the days to come.

Hey everyone, we’re now roughly half-way through the voting process. We’ve got some great apps in the running this year. The top of the leaderboard really looks fantastic.

We’ve also seen a generous amount of media coverage for competitors and their apps, including articles at SitePoint, TechCrunch, and Mashable. Welcome to all our new judges that found us through those sources. I hope you enjoy checking out some brand new web properties and helping us determine who deserves to take home the prizes. If you know other folks who may be interested, please invite them! Anyone can vote. Selection is a collaborative process and the more opinions we have, the better. Remember that a random selection of judges will also win Amazon gift certificates, so there’s a little bit of extra motivation!

As an additional bit of housekeeping, note that we have had to disqualify a few teams for rule violations. If you have reason to believe that an entry has violated the rules, please contact us directly rather than just giving them low scores in your ballots because you suspect something. We will investigate any allegations brought to us that have merit.

Before I go I’d also like to call your attention to a number of special offers being offered to participants through our sponsors. If you log into your account and view the user profile, those offers are listed in the right hand column. Thanks again to Linode, JanRain, RailsKits, and the other companies who are offering special discounts on their services to our judges and participants. You can find some awesome savings here on hosting, a free version of JanRain’s RPX service (for easy OpenID integration), and much more.

In case you haven’t already heard, voting is now open for the 2008 Rails Rumble! Rumble team members already have the ability to vote and just need to log into their accounts to get started. If you weren’t competing but are interested in judging applications, just sign-up for a new account and you’ll be off and running.

How It Works

We’re doing something a little different this year. Voting is not being conducted via the typical free-for-all, anything goes ratings system. For the 2008 event, voters are issued ballots for a limited number of competition apps each day. Each ballot consists of four criteria to rate an app on a five star scale:

• Appearance — The professionalism of the app’s design, aesthetics, usability
• Completeness — How finished does this app feel? Is it missing key features that make it unusable? Is it buggy?
• Innovation — How original and innovative is the app? Is it new, unique, and different or just a rehash of an existing idea?
• Usefulness — Is there an audience for this app? Will it be useful to them? Something they can really use? Or is it superfluous?

This system is designed to evenly distribute ballots for each competition app and only allow each voter’s ballot to count once — though a voter can revise their ratings at any time. Finally, voters will receive new ballots each day, but only to replace the ballots cast.

Why?

It’s understandable that some might be frustrated by this system — especially if they are unable to vote on their favorite apps right away. Remember that the Rumble is not just about winning prizes, but promoting Rails, the Rails community, and all the apps built within the 48 hour event. By going with a ballot system, we’re seeking to level the playing field between apps as much as possible, eliminate ballot stuffing, and ensure that apps are judged based on their individual merits rather than being a simple popularity contest.

In Summary

In summary, getting your vote on is simple:

1. Sign-up for an account if you don’t already have one
2. Check out each of the apps identified in your freshly minted batch of ballots
3. Rate each app on Appearance, Completeness, Innovation, and Usefulness
4. Come back tomorrow and use your next batch of ballots

Voting ends at Midnight GMT on 1 Novemember, 2008. Get out, check out those apps, and cast those ballots! Make sure to tell your friends, your family, and especially your fans. Anyone can vote — the more voter diversity we have, the better.

He waits.



For the Grand Prize winner of the 2008 Rails Rumble, the organizers team have included this mint condition Chuck Norris Undercover Agent Action figure from 1986, still in the original packaging. He comes with Sekitei Sommersault Action too, so you’re sure to be the coolest kid on the block with Chuck Norris on your side :-)

PS – Voting will be opening very soon…