Presenters: Terra Friedrichs and Chris Williams, Citizen Action Team

Audience: Programmers and managers responsible for online database projects

How RAD programming differs from traditional software design, and why Rails best met the technical need to develop an emergency-response application to coordinate hurricane relief organizations. The relief effort had grown so fast that an online database was required to track resources. It grew to become the largest publicly accessible relief database in the gulf, the country, and perhaps the world. Implemented using open source Ruby on Rails, the site has had over 140,000 hits since inception 7 months ago. The site still gets hundreds of hits/day, and over a thousand unique visitors each month.

You can download a copy of Chris's powerpoint presentation, which includes a Rails quick-start guide, here.

Contact info for Terra and Chris is here. Thanks to everyone who came!