Assembly Organizing

Assembly Organizing is the organizer of one of the world's most popular demo parties held annually in Helsinki, Finland. The event gathers over 5000 participants to spend four action packed days and enjoys international attention for e.g. its AssemblyTV broad and webcasts. The event is one of the most highly regarded in the demo and LAN party scenes. The events are organized by over 240 volunteers backed by Assembly Organizing and supported by industry leaders such as nVIDIA, ASUS, ZyXEL, Hewlett-Packard and Nokia.

The challenge:

Assembly Organizing wanted to turn around the paradigm of its existing website from a unidirectional communication tool to an infrastructure capable of handling an active community of thousands of users. Not only would the infrastructure need to be highly extensible and customizable, but it would also need to be able to scale up to service thousands of simultaneous users demanding a multitude of services.

As Assembly Organizing itself is a community of volunteers too, it was obvious that the selected system would also need to provide ready collaboration and intranet features for coordinating the geographically distributed teams.

The solution:

After a thorough assesment of existing systems Assembly Organizing chose Zope and Plone for their significant competitive advantages. The system offered a majority of the required features "out of the box" while at the same time offered standards compliant extensibility and customizability even to the source code level. As both systems were field proven for demanding customers and backed by active community and companies, the choice was an easy one to make.

Due to the complex requirements Assembly Organizing chose a veteran consulting company, Gocept, to design the key architecture of the system.

"It was easy to choose Gocept because of their extensive experience and knowledge of the Zope and Plone systems" says Mr. Jussi Laakkonen, partner and co-founder of Assembly Organizing. "They had solved similar high scalability issues successfully and had in-depth experience in customizing the Zope and Plone for demanding customers" continues Mr. Laakkonen.

Gocept's experience proved to be essential for the success of the project. Not only did Gocept architect the whole system, select the key add-on components and provide the necessary programming expertise but they also transferred a lot of knowledge to Assembly Organizing's local team on-site and continued to optimize and monitor the system through its introduction.

The advantages:

Zope and Plone provide Assembly Organizing with a continuously evolving platform, which has a great active developer community churning out terrific add-ons and customizations for the core systems. This allows Assembly Organizing to focus on developing strictly its own specialized components.

"The infrastructure has been proven to be scalable even beyond our needs and we have yet barely tapped the full potential of the existing add-ons" says Mr. Jussi Laakkonen.

Gocept's consulting experience made it possible for Assembly Organizing to avoid critical issues with the architecture and "get it right the first time". "I can whole heartedly recommend Gocept for any other company looking to fast track their Zope and Plone projects".

Assembly Organizing