Today's Deep-Dive: Engelsystem

Have you ever just stopped and thought about what it takes to organize a massive

event?

Especially when you've got hundreds, maybe even thousands, of volunteers involved.

How on earth do you keep track of who's doing what, and when, and where? It

honestly feels

like trying to herd cats in a hurricane. Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today we're

looking at a

fascinating piece of software designed to bring some serious order to that kind of

chaos. It's

called Engle System, and our mission today is pretty clear. We want to unpack what

Engle System

actually is, dig into its really quite powerful features, understand the tech

behind it, but in

simple terms, and see where it's being used out there in the real world. We really

want to make

this easy to grasp, whether you're deep into tech or just kind of curious about how

these huge events

manage to pull it off. But just before we dive right in, a quick word about our

supporter.

This deep dive is brought to you by Safe Server. Safe Server actually takes care of

hosting this

kind of powerful software, and they can support you in your own digital

transformation journey.

You're going to find out more at www.safeserver.de. Okay, so let's get into it. Engle

System. I mean,

talking about organizing volunteers, a lot of people probably picture, I don't know,

a big

shared spreadsheet, maybe some frantic phone calls back and forth. Is Engle System

just a sort of a

glorified spreadsheet, or is it doing something fundamentally different? Oh, it's

fundamentally

different. Yeah, I mean, calling it a spreadsheet is, well, it's like calling a jet

engine just a fan.

It doesn't quite capture it. At its heart, Engle System is officially described as

an online tool

for helper and shift planning on large events. Think of it more like a central

command center,

a digital brain maybe, for managing the absolute most critical resource at these

big gatherings,

the volunteers, or as the system sometimes calls them, the angels. It's really

designed to

streamline that whole process. So whether you, as the organizer, need to assign

specific people to

very specific teams and shifts, or maybe you want to empower the volunteers

themselves,

let them choose when and where they pitch in. It handles both approaches. It's

about structure,

clarity, and honestly, efficiency. Right, so it makes life easier for the

organizers, definitely.

But it sounds like it improves things for the volunteers, too, getting them the

info they need.

And what's really interesting to me is this open source aspect you mentioned. Why

is that such a

big deal for a tool like this? Yeah, exactly. That's a huge point. It's released

under a GPL 2.0

license. Now, that doesn't just mean it's free, as in cost. It means the actual

code, the blueprint

of the software, is openly available. Anyone can look at it, use it, even change it,

or build upon

it. And that fosters this amazing collaborative community. If you pop over to

places like GitHub,

you see it's got hundreds of stars, kind of like bookmarks showing interest, but

also loads of

forks. That means people are actively taking the code, maybe adapting it for their

own event,

or even contributing improvements back to the main project. So it's constantly

being refined by the

people actually using it. Precisely. You have this global pool of contributors

making it better,

adding features, fixing bugs, often way faster than a single company could manage.

And it means

event organizers aren't locked into one vendor. They can tweak the code if they

need something

specific, and they benefit from all that shared knowledge and testing. It makes it

really robust

and adaptable. That makes a lot of sense. Community power driving development. Okay,

let's dig into the features then. What specific things can Angle System do that

make it such a

powerhouse for these, frankly, enormous events? Well, it's definitely packed with

features built

for exactly that scale and flexibility. The first thing you have to talk about is

scalability. I

mean, it's engineered from the ground up to handle thousands of helpers and

potentially tens of

thousands of shift hours without grinding to a halt. And that's not just a

theoretical limit,

it's been battle tested, proven in practice at some really big complex events. Wow.

Okay.

Thousands of people, tens of thousands of hours. That's serious capacity. What else?

Then there's

the comprehensive management aspect. It lets you manage almost everything related

to the volunteers,

so the helpers themselves, obviously, but also defining different teams, allocating

specific

rooms or areas for tasks, setting up every single shift, broadcasting event news to

everyone or just

specific groups, even scheduling meetings. It brings all these pieces together in

one place

instead of organizers juggling spreadsheets, emails, maybe physical sign-up sheets.

Yeah,

I can just picture the nightmare of trying to coordinate that manually. Exactly.

Then there's

user flexibility. It comes in German and English out of the box, but the language

support is designed

to be expandable. So you could add other languages for international events. And it

has this feature

they call a complex shift view with filter, which sounds technical, but it's

incredibly useful. How

does that work in practice? Well, imagine you've got thousands of shifts listed.

Instead of scrolling

forever, this view lets you instantly filter. Maybe you only want to see shifts for

the info desk team

on Saturday afternoon, or as a volunteer, you just want to see the shifts you've

signed up for. Click,

click done. It cuts through the noise. Okay, that is smart. Finding what you need

fast is crucial

when you're dealing with that much information. Definitely. And related to that is

integration

and convenience. This is a big one. It can actually import shift schedules directly

from

other event platforms, specifically FRAB or pre-talks instances. Ah, okay. Those

are often

used for managing the speaker schedules at conferences, right? Yeah, exactly. So if

your

conference schedule is already set up in FRAB or pre-talks, Engle system can just

pull that data in.

No need to enter everything twice, which avoids errors and saves a ton of time. And

for the

volunteers, the helpers, there's an iCal export for their shifts. That's brilliant.

Isn't it?

They just click a button and boom, all their assigned shifts pop right into their

personal

calendar, Google calendar, Outlook, whatever they use. That was drastically cut

down on

missed shifts or confusion? Hugely. No more. Oh, forgot to write that down. It's

right there on

their phone. But it goes even further than just shifts. There's attendance

management built in,

so you can actually track who showed up for their shift, when they arrived, when

they left.

Really important for accountability and planning. It even includes a reward system.

You can set it

up with points or badges or whatever makes sense for your event. Like gamification

for

volunteerings. Sort of, yeah. It sounds a bit fluffy, maybe, but it taps into basic

motivation.

It can be a really powerful way to boost volunteer morale, make them feel

appreciated,

and actually improve retention, getting people to come back and help year after

year. Plus,

there's a built-in messaging system for sending targeted messages, maybe just to

one team,

or all volunteers who haven't completed a certain task. And a Q&A system where

organizers can post

answers to common questions, which cuts down on repetitive emails. Oh, and team

descriptions

support Markdown, so you can format them nicely with bold texts, lists, whatever.

Makes things

clearer. That is genuinely comprehensive. It really does sound like they've thought

of almost

everything, from the big picture planning right down to the individual volunteers'

experience

in communication. Okay, but for someone like me, maybe not a hardcore developer,

what does it

actually take to run this thing? How does all this tech magic happen behind the

scenes? Is

it super complicated? That's a fair question. It is powerful, but it's not quite

like installing

an app from an app store. It's what's called a web-based application. So it runs on

a server,

basically, a computer that's set up to host websites and applications connected to

the

internet. You, the user, just access it through your normal web browser, like

Chrome or Firefox,

by going to a specific web address. Okay, so nothing installed on my own computer.

It lives

online somewhere. Exactly. And to make that happen, it needs a few key ingredients

on that server.

First, a web server software like Apache or Nginx. These are the programs that

handle

requests from your browser and serve up the Ingle system pages. Then it needs the

programming language

it's written in, which is PHP. The recommendation is now PHP version 8.2 or higher.

PHP is like the

engine doing the work processing logins, fetching shift data, saving changes. And

finally, it needs

a place to store all that data, the volunteer names, shift times, team lists,

everything. That's the

database. It uses common ones like MySQL or its close relative, MariaDB. It needs

version 5.7.8

or newer of those. So, web server, PHP, and a database. Those sound like fairly

standard

components for web stuff, right? They are. Very common building blocks for dynamic

websites and

applications. And does it need a massive, super powerful server given it's handling

potentially

thousands of users? You'd think so, but actually, no. That's one of the impressive

things is its

resource efficiency. Based on real world usage at large events, something like two

CPU cores

and maybe two gigabytes of RAM is often enough to handle up to around a thousand

volunteers,

or angels, concurrently during an event. Really? Just two cores and two gigs? That

seems surprisingly

low for that scale. It is surprisingly lean. It's quite well optimized, which means

you don't

necessarily need to spend a fortune on hosting infrastructure. Now, getting it set

up, that does

require a bit of technical know-how or at least access to someone who has it, like

IT support.

It's not really aimed at complete beginners for the installation part. Okay, so how

do you actually

install it then? You've got a couple of main options. The traditional way is manual

setup.

You download the code files, upload them to your server, configure the web server

to point to the

right directory, or there's a more modern approach using Docker. Docker is, think

of it like getting

pre-packaged containers for everything Engle system needs. One container has the

web server

perfectly configured, another has the right pht version, another has the database.

It bundles

everything up neatly, making the setup much simpler and less prone to errors caused

by slightly

different server environments. It kind of snaps together. Docker sounds like the

easier route if

you can use it. Often, yes. If you go the manual route, after getting the files in

place, you need

to make sure the web server has permission to write to certain folders. Then you

set up the database

itself, create a user, a password, and then you run an initial migration script.

This script basically

sets up the structure inside the database, creates all the necessary tables for

volunteers, shifts,

teams, et cetera, before you put any actual data in. It's like building the empty

filing cabinets.

Gotcha. Building the framework first. Exactly. And one crucial security note.

When you first install it, there's a default administrator login username, admin,

password,

as FastEF. You absolutely must change that immediately after you log in the first

time,

like right away. Good tip. Okay. So definitely not plug and play for the average

user, but

for an organization with some tech capability or access to it, it sounds like it

offers immense

control and efficiency that you just couldn't get otherwise. It feels very

professional. Great.

And you mentioned it's battle tested. So where has Engel system actually been put

through its paces?

What kind of real world events are relying on this system? Oh, absolutely. The

proof is definitely

in its usage. It has a really strong track record, especially within the chaos

events community in

Europe. If you look at their official references list, it's pretty impressive. It's

been the

backbone for volunteer coordination at numerous chaos communication Congress events.

That's this

huge annual hacker conference, tens of thousands of people. We're talking events

like 37 C3, 36 C3,

35 C3. Going way back through the 30s, the 20s, like 29 C3 and even earlier

versions from 21 C3

up to 28 C3 used it. Wow. So year after year at one of the biggest tech gatherings

around. Yeah.

And also at the chaos communication camps. These are massive outdoor events held

every four years,

even more complex logistically in some ways. It powered CCAMP 23, CCAMP 19, CCAMP

15. So it's

handled both huge indoor conferences and sprawling outdoor festivals. That's

serious validation right

there. Any other examples? Definitely. It's not just the biggest chaos events. It

shows its

flexibility by being used at a whole range of other gatherings too. Things like MRMCD,

GPN,

EasterHeg, which are other chaos related or hacker community events, but also MozFest

in London,

which is Mozilla's big festival, FrostCon, a free and open source software

conference,

Hackover, Cigen. This diverse list really shows it's adaptable. It's not just for

one specific

type of tech event. It can handle the demands of different kinds of large scale

gatherings.

That is incredibly powerful validation, seeing it used successfully, repeatedly at

such high profile

complex events known for their scale. It really speaks volumes about the quality of

the software

and, as you said, the strength of the community behind it. It absolutely does. And

the great thing

reinforcing that community aspect is that the documentation is all available online,

mostly on

GitHub. Makes it easier for new folks to get started, whether they want to use it

or contribute.

If you run into bugs or installation issues, GitHub issues are the way to report

them. And

for specific questions about using it for chaos events, they even list a dedicated

email contact.

That strong support structure, combined with the open development model, is really

key to why it's

been so successful and why it continues to improve. It keeps it relevant and

reliable

for organizers all over. Well, this has been a truly fascinating deep dive into Engle

system.

We've really seen how this open source powerhouse tackles what seems like an

impossible task,

organizing potentially thousands of volunteers across tens of thousands of shift

hours for

these huge events. It's a fantastic example of powerful scalable software that's

clearly designed

with very real world needs front and center and built collaboratively. Really

impressive stuff.

It really is. And it kind of makes you pause and think, doesn't it? What other

really complex

organizational headaches, maybe even things in your own work or community projects

could potentially

be transformed by using these kinds of robust, adaptable, community driven open

source tools,

you know, like Engle system. It highlights the power of people working together,

sharing solutions

instead of relying solely on expensive closed off software. That is a great thought

to leave everyone

with. What problems could you solve with collaborative open tools? Food for thought,

indeed. Thank you so

much for walking us through that. And a huge thank you again to our sponsor, Safe

Server, for

supporting this deep dive. Remember, they help organizations host software like

this and support

digital transformation. You can find out more at what they offer at www.safeserver.de.

joining us today. Until next time, keep digging deeper.

joining us today. Until next time, keep digging deeper.