Tiny Little Flashlights
Flashlights is the organizers' portal for a volunteer-run event or meetup: volunteers, speakers and their checklists, sponsors, the schedule, and the files that go with them, in one place instead of a dozen spreadsheets.
It is derived from the PyLadiesCon portal and keeps pulling improvements from it. One instance serves one community; each year's event is an edition inside it. What an instance is called, its colour, its links and which features it runs are configuration, so the same software serves a three-day online conference and a monthly meetup. Flashlights is named after the Darren Hayes song Tiny Little Flashlights, from the album Secret Codes and Battleships.
Where to start
- Organisers: the User Guide says what each part of the portal does and which parts a small event can skip.
- Developers: the Setup Guide gets a local instance running with sample data in a few commands; the Design System page explains the look.
- Hosting: Deployment is the boot contract: the services an instance needs and the variables that configure it; the environment reference lists every one.
- Your own community: Adapting Flashlights is what you can change without code, and what to do when that is not enough.
- Your own code: Community apps is how a community adds a Django app to the core image, and which parts of the core it may rely on.
Nothing loads from anywhere else
Every page is served by the instance itself: the fonts, the icons, the charts and every script. There are no analytics, no advertising and no third-party cookies, and a third-party service is used only when it is absolutely needed and no adequate open-source, self-hosted option exists. Third-party code and services lists what is vendored, how its updates arrive, and the services an instance talks to on the server side.
Licence and contributions
Flashlights is free software under the GNU AGPL version 3, with an additional permission to run a modified copy for your own organisation's events without publishing the changes. It is published for use and study and does not take code contributions; bug reports, ideas and reports of what confused you are welcome as issues. See Working on the code.