TL;DR - PartyMan is now open source https://gitlab.com/T-101/partyman

The long story:

During Assembly 2019 we were still using PMS, but it had fallen into quite severe code rot and was missing key features such as live vote. I looked at the code with Spiikki and we just decided to start making a brand new system. At that time there was a shortage of party management systems that were available, it was basically Wuhu. Since none of us organizers were fluent in PHP, it felt like a good choice to start something new. Or so I thought...

PartyMan debuted at Assembly Online 2020 during Covid. It was broken as hell and I spent sleepless nights fixing a plethora of bugs and database errors. Before and during the party. The following few parties very not as intense but still insomnia-inducing.

While this project was started for the needs of Assembly, it was clear to me from day one that it should also cater to other parties. As time went by I listened to the needs of party organizers and continued work on PartyMan, trying to make a one-stop solution for party organizers. This obviously caused the scope to balloon, with me as a junior developer continously learning from my constant mistakes. Years went by, with each iteration bringing something new to the table. Pretty soon interest started to arise from other organizers, along with demands for new features.

This has been a furious journey lasting about seven years, but I finally feel safe-ish enough to release this into the wild. This is now very stable, but that is to not say it's bug free. But after this summers three parties, I think I got the show stoppers cleared out. The work will continue, and I can only hope that the community will provide some help on how we move forward from here. I gotta say, I'm starting to wear out of doing everything myself.

It is built on Python 3 using Django 5.2 (started life in Django 3.0) and it follows the Django discipline of "Batteries included". On the deployment side it is obviously dockerized, but there is still some work to be done there too. In this current climate we live, the tech of statically rendered pages is slightly outdated. And now there are more modern options for freely available partysystems, like Granola and Partyboi. All that withstanding, I'll release this in hopes that someone some day might find it useful.

Some of you may or may not know that with the co-operation from CompoCrew ry association of Finland and it's sponsors, PartyMan is also available as a hassle-free hosted version. I'm not sure how long this will continue, but as long as it does it can be requested via https://partyman.cloud

I need to thank the people helping me out with development during these years, so here in alphabetical order: Gargaj, Gasman, Ozkuu, sivu, Spiikki. I'm sure I forgot someone - sorry and Thank You!

I also need to thank the numerous parties and individuals who fearlessly tried PartyMan out while in unstable development versions: Anonym (Transmission), Arabek (Xenium), Codise (ATK-Lohja, Bukka), Franky (Rsync, Transmission), mikron (Zoo, Byte40y) PS (Inercia, Impulse), Paaris (JLan, Byte40y), Ricky Martin (68k Inside) and of course the folks at Sommarhack.

So there you go. I will now exhale.