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talks.cam

[Team | Jackson Team] [Tech Lead | TBC] [Service Owner | TBC] [Service Manager | ad2139] [Product Manager | TBC]

This page gives an overview of talks.cam, describing its current status, where and how it's developed and deployed, and who is responsible for maintaining it.

Service Description

talks.cam is the University's platform for managing, disseminating, and advertising talks organised by departments, research groups, societies, and individuals (although not lectures associated with taught courses). Features that set it apart from being a conventional University talks-listing service include:

  • The content is entirely user-generated, content-management is deliberately de-centralised
  • The content can be consumed in numerous ways beyond directly browsing the website (e.g. feeds, embedding, email reminders)
  • Talks can be aggregated into numerous Lists, and Lists themselves can be aggregated into Lists
  • The target audience includes the wider local community beyond the University
  • Public archiving: old talks are deliberately preserved as a snapshot of the University's intellectual activity

Also see:

Service Status

talks.cam is currently live.

The current talks.cam system is reaching the end of its life, and in the medium-term, UIS is investigating how best to continue providing a largely equivalent service via a more modern and sustainable platform, before decommissioning the current system. In the meantime, the current system is not being actively developed.

Contact

Queries about the content on the site itself (i.e. queries about Talks, Lists of Talks, and anything to do with the actual events that they relate to) should usually be sent to the content owners directly, NOT to UIS in the first instance - any logged-in user can view the contact details for a Talk or List by clicking the contact person's name, as displayed on Talk and List pages (look for If you have a question about this [talk|list], please contact organiser-name on the page). Anybody with a Raven account can login to Talks.cam (and thus view such contact details).

In the case of content that is obviously not legitimate, please contact webmaster@talks.cam.ac.uk.

Technical queries and support should be directed to webmaster@talks.cam.ac.uk and will be picked up by a member of the team working on the service. To ensure that you receive a response, always direct requests to webmaster@talks.cam.ac.uk rather than reaching out to team members directly.

With regards issues discovered in the service or new feature requests, due to the current status of the service, only the most critical issues will be acted upon. All other requests will either be parked or noted for inclusion in a future replacement system. Bearing this in mind, please send critical issues to webmaster@talks.cam.ac.uk.

Environments

talks.cam is currently deployed to the following environments:

Name URL Supporting VMs
Production https://talks.cam.ac.uk talks-web1.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk
talks-web2.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk
Database talks-sql.internal.admin.cam.ac.uk
The UIS Servers and Storage Team (infra-sas) have details of the two DB servers backing this single hostname

Note that access to the supporting VMs is restricted to a small subset of the ACN.

Source code

Please see further information on GitLab visible to UIS Staff.

Technologies used

The following gives an overview of the technologies talks.cam is built on.

Category Language Framework(s)
Server Ruby Rails
DB MySQL n/a

Also see further information on GitLab visible to UIS Staff.

Operational documentation

Please see further information on GitLab visible to UIS Staff.

Service Management

The Team responsible for this service is Jackson Team.

The Tech Lead for this service is TBC.

The Service Owner for this service is TBC.

The Service Manager for this service is ad2139.

The Product Manager for this service is TBC.