The goals of the contest are to motivate the enhancement of programming skills, creativity and innovation, and to accelerate the growth of local OSS developer community to build a talent pool of critical skills and expertise for national transformation.

Before the contest, OSCC MAMPU pro-actively promoted the event through various channels comprising email, cold call, and social network such as Facebook. Posters were distributed to Government agencies, IPTAs and strategic buildings around Klang Valley. In response, 42 teams submitted their entry forms to participate in the contest.

Contest applicants were required to submit program code and resulting output to solve the Tower of Hanoi quest. Tower of Hanoi is a mathematical puzzle, comprising three rods and a number of disks of varying sizes which can slide onto any rod. The puzzle starts with the disks in a neat stack in ascending order by size on one rod, the smallest at the top, thus making a conical shape.

The objective of the puzzle is to move the entire stack to another rod, obeying rules, i.e. only one disk may be moved at a time, each move consists of taking the upper disk from one of the rods and sliding it onto another rod on top of the other disks that may already be present on that rod, and no disk may be placed on top of a smaller disk.

Based on entry forms submitted, short-listing was conducted in 3 rounds. In Round 1, entries with incorrect output and invalid program logic were eliminated. Round 2 focused on technical evaluation such as coding quality and programming structure, coding and output layout, consistency in source code, methodology and OSS tools used. Round 3 considered creativity in answering a simple question, “Why should you be selected?”.

After a rigorous and impartial selection process, 16 teams of 3 members each were short-listed to compete, comprising 9 Government teams, 3 Student teams and 4 Open teams.

The contest involved the 16 short-listed teams spending 36 continuous hours developing a fully functional Office Information System for use in any organisation's Intranet. Contestants of all the 16 teams were enshrined with honour in the Malaysia Book of Records as the record makers.

The objective of the Office Information System is to provide transparent information to all staff in the office. The topic was agreed after carefully considering factors such as feasible development time, general subject of common knowledge, rare availability of similar system in the Internet, usefulness and further development potential. Contest teams are required to complete eight modules within 36 hours, including information for attendance, out-of-office, visitor, meeting room availability, notice board, company calendar, company directory and common address book.

Contest rules required all teams to use open source programming language to develop their web application and the product developed with the chosen programming language had to be deployed in an open source web application server running Linux. Contest teams retain ownership of the web application produced in this contest, but must agree to release the source code under GPL Version 2 license. After the contest, they are encouraged to continue working on the web application and contribute the product to the global OSS community.

The contest kicked off at 10pm on 6 October and ended 36 hours later at 10am, 8 October. The opening was officiated by YBhg. Dato' Dr. Nor Aliah Binti Mohd Zahri, Deputy Director General (ICT) of MAMPU and the closing was officiated by Y.B Tuan Haji Fadillah Yusof, Deputy Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) on behalf of Y.B. Datuk Seri Dr. Maximus Johnity Ongkili, Minister of MOSTI .

Three judges were carefully selected for the evaluation process at the end of the contest. They were En. Mohd Nazri bin Md Saad from Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI), appointed as Chief Judge, Tuan Haji Mohsin Sarip from Majlis Bandaraya Melaka Bersejara (MBMB) and En. M. Fauzilkamil Zainuddin from OSS community.

The contest was judged in 2 parts comprising first, the 3 appointed judges and second, all the competing teams. Judging criteria were functionality (50%), user interface (25%) and creativity, innovation & originality (25%). The weighting of the judging was 70% by panel of 3 judges and 30% by competing teams.

An award ceremony was held during the opening ceremony of MyGOSSCON 2010. Hezmutt, a team formed by UPM staff, emerged as winner in the Government category. Runner-up was Subarashii from Kementerian Wilayah Persekutuan and Kesejahteraan Bandar. Winner in the Student category was Cyberlogic, with Netcentric selected as the runner-up. Both teams were formed by UiTM students. Winner in the Open category was Localhost, with runner-up honours going to Keris MY. Both teams represent OSS community. The over-all grand winner was Localhost, who won the Best-of-the-Best Award.

Source:

Malaysian Public Sector Open Source Software Program
http://oscc.org.my