Need Advice On A Open Source Community Concept
Xerond
Undefined Join Date: 2004-07-09 Member: 29817Members, Constellation
Undefined Join Date: 2004-07-09 Member: 29817Members, Constellation
<div class="IPBDescription">Web Programmers Please Advise!</div>Hey there over the past couple of days I've been up all night refining a 4 page paper to help out-line an open source community project that I would like to start. Regarding the technical ground-work for how this concept might be brought into manifest is something I really need help on as I am not a programmer.
*Update* Please check my next post in this thread to see what this project is all about.
*Update* Please check my next post in this thread to see what this project is all about.
Comments
<a href="http://www.OneSynergy.org" target="_blank">http://www.OneSynergy.org</a> (this is being released at the time of this post)
Here is a citation from the introduction paragraph of the project's first conceptual draft paper. Which can be found here: <a href="http://www.onesynergy.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2" target="_blank">http://www.onesynergy.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2</a> I just switched over the forums from a free service to a dedicated host. New forums are being set up now.
"The goal of the Synergy Project is to create a community environment conductive to collaborative problem solving within user systems of relation. Specifically addressing social concerns on the local scale and up to the global environment. By using tools to visually and elegantly represent the trends of social concern, we can allow basic users the ability to form constructive solutions based on the objective collaboration of other users on specific and related issues. Being able to universally distribute information to any user, we are effectively placing the tools of technical analysis into the creative hands of the users. Issues within their scope of concern can democratically be realized by the amount of people who participate in that realm of concern. For example, issues that relate to sustainability, health, efficiency, cohesion, education, ecology, and economic criteria. As problems become increasingly realized and supported by users within their scope of concern, the scope widens to ask for solutions(participation) from users who are "on the border" of these issues. Realizing that working together on issues in this existence is more conductive to life sustainability than competition. And accepting that combined efforts in an environment conducive to critical thinking, technical analysis, and objective creativity, are some of the best social tools used to solve life's problems. By embracing technology and taking advantage of it as a great social tool, we hope to accelerate society's ability to heal itself. By bringing the world together through our shared problems, and achievements, we can unite the world with logic and creativity."
The above paragraph is quite vague and tries to encapsulate what the 4 page paper helps to explain. For details read the post.
If anyone here has any interest in participating then please register and start asking questions or offering suggestions. And if you think its a good idea but don't have the knowledge, time, or resources to contribute then I would ask to just pass it on to someone you think might. If you have any major questions I would request that you post them on the forums so I can address them there. Anything small I wouldn't mind answering them here. =) Thank you for your time.
Start with a small scope. I think your end goal is worthy, but it's extremely unlikely you'll be able to build a system to meet all those criteria at once.
Also if you have a dedicated small quality user base it will be easier to expand rather than trying to get quality input for everything under the sun all at once. So start small with a project like an open source project idea repository in New York City, or an public issue prioritizer for a town government and design primarily for that small community.
Leverage existing technologies as much as possible. A lot of the pieces needed for this project like digg/slashdot style moderation and comment system, wiki style knowledge base, JIRA style work progress, etc are all ready out there. The less time you spend reinventing the wheel the more you can work on the core of your project.
Figure out how you're going to be different and make that the core of your project. Make sure the features you add are enhancing the core.
Have a simple and clean interface. This is probably the single most important thing to get people to use your product.
Read a couple of those dreaded "project management books". I recommend <!--coloro:purple--><span style="color:purple"><!--/coloro--><u>Purple Cow</u><!--colorc--></span><!--/colorc--> by Seth Godin. And <u><a href="http://gettingreal.37signals.com/" target="_blank">Getting Real</a></u> by 37signals. They're both short and <u>Getting Real</u> is free(as in beer). I may register on your forums later. In any case, good luck.
And yes everything you've outlined definitely coincide with everything I've been able to register and inform myself with regarding the organization priorities of a start-up project like this. I've been feeding myself with as much open-source related material (videos, talks, articles, other os projects, etc) and as I continue to discover what these experienced people would say needs to be your personal motives and what the goals of the project are... they align themselves perfectly with the overall goal of the project. And essence the goals of the project are two fold: create an OS community centered around a web application. Create a user community centered around the OS content held within the web application. And the challenges met with the initial developer community will translate into the user community quite well. Its kind of like a problem that solves it self. In that, the end goal user experience is to translate the "open source" development mentality into the user-base that doesn't know the back-end code at all, but can manage and bring content in a similar manner. And then finally, for the user-base to translate that mentality in managing social concerns:"Disease issues, career related problems, societal wide problems, even down to a single city needing a community project." The user base scope has to scale from small to wide, as that is the point of the whole thing.
"Start with a small scope. I think your end goal is worthy, but it's extremely unlikely you'll be able to build a system to meet all those criteria at once. " I definitely agree. The biggest lacking that this start-up has is code content. Something I've been able to get a grip of is that open-source projects with no code are nothing. And aside from the concept proposed the actual technical ground-work hasn't been laid down yet. And so getting an initial prototype up and running that would tackle a small amount of the project's goal criteria is important. Luckily, initial response from the people I've exposed it to have all agreed upon it's plausibility. But, getting a small technical prototype is really my most major concern. I wouldn't call myself a programmer as I only know HTML and some PHP. But I'm learning and educating myself as vigorously as possible.
I realize my concept encapsulates a lot of different criteria but it is mainly supposed to be an idea catalyst. My initial input is only that. And the great thing about open-source mentality is that this idea doesn't "belong" to me. It belongs to the people who want to work on it, as people join the community and voice their input and show their participation I will fully respect them and openly share this. Even at the cost of this becoming something that I didn't originally envision in the first place.
I'm just a catalyst, the direction that the community around it finds, and feels is the direction it will go.
The free forum service that I set up for this thing yesterday has been a big amount of FAIL. Up-time and site speeds are ridiculously bad, not even sure why I thought to do it in the first place. The forums located on the original domain are up but I just have to port the content over before I open it up. So, if you're gonna register I'd suggest you do it after the port which should be by tonight. I'm also going to set up a simple mail-list so anyone who is interested but doesn't want to openly say anything can subscribe and follow the progress as it goes.
Some good advice: Cut down on the "babble" in your speech. Contrary to popular belief - small simple words are ideal for relaying information in a quick and easy to understand manner.
A tool like this is a statistical gold mine for sure - and something I'm sure any 3-letter-organization would love to have. From a programmatic standpoint, though, providing a tool to allow that kind of flexibility is pretty much a fool's errand. You'd need to narrow your scope, at least to begin. Focus on tabular data in comma delimited format. Maybe even only real numbers in column delimited format, and only allow people to make 2-axis graphs with it in different scales. As you add features, you can provide more graphical tools and ingest more types of data.
Another possibility would be to not provide that specific tool at all. Only provide a means to link data providers (anyone with a cell phone or a ham radio and a log book) with statisticians and graphic artists.
Ultimately, you need to identify a core observation and hang everything you do off of that in some way. For instance, in a car, the core observation is that igniting a combustible gas inside of a confined piston will create enough pressure to drive that piston outwards. Most other devices on a car are meant to serve that observation and make it work more efficiently, either by allowing the car to mechanically do its job or providing comfort to the driver so that he/she can keep driving longer.
In your case, your observation seems to be that combining and categorizing data sources by time and space provides synergy that reveals previously hidden conclusions. It's a fine assumption (actually one that I've been very excited about over the last year or so), and you just need to make sure you keep that assumption in mind as you move forward.
But I'll correct you on a few things, I'm not aiming to create a "product" per se, even though I would encourage the use of it by organizations. The "data" you're talking about can be tied to the user submitted issues like source material. But the real data visualization is of the issues within the system and how they relate to each-other. I'm looking at this as a collaborative project and my influence may only be to start the discussion. Just recently it kind of dawned on me why I was able to make this connection with this idea and its because its related to bug tracking.
En essence, the project is a social bug-tracking application that allows general users the ability to report social problems in the real world. And to also track their progress while encouraging objective discussion. There are a few more bells and whistles that help to make it better but I think that is the core idea. I just made a 20 minute video to help describe what I'm talking about. I'm not a great talker but hopefully this gets the idea across better.
If any of you guys would like to check out the videos, I posted them in the new forums that I've set up:
<a href="http://www.onesynergy.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4" target="_blank">http://www.onesynergy.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4</a>
I'm going to be a setting up a mailing-list today along with a real home-page to help inform and direct traffic to the site.
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<b>What?</b>
The Synergy Project aims to create a free, open-source web application used for collaborative problem solving.
Features:<ul><li>For issues to be submitted within a local context, yet available globally.</li><li>Specifically and generally relating user profiles to problems submitted to the system.</li><li>To render these "issues" to users based on user concern. We would like to use various 3d models to display the population of these issues as they relate to each-other, and the concern factor they hold.</li><li>To attach real world events and source material to these issues as they evolve.</li><li>To show concern trending with each problem to give users an idea what kind of attention it is attracting.</li><li>To create a proposal system for users to submit comprehensive suggestions for fixes. This proposal system would ask the user to address as much source material as possible.</li></ul>
<b>How?</b>
Currently we're in the process of nailing down which platforms to attack. We're considering modifying MediaWiki and using it as an initial platform with which to launch development. Since we hope to integrate some more advanced visualizations compared to a standard wiki page, we're looking to figure out the best way to achieve that.[/list]
<b>Why?</b>
In practicality there are already models in place that are proving the proficiency of collaborative organizations. The biggest example being Wikipedia. So why not step it up and test the bounds of this type of organization? Some positive possibilities would be fast and diverse reporting of world events as they happen. Just as we see how fast Wikipedia pages manifest and update, we could see that here. We could witness open discussions that encourages users from diverse geographic areas and different fields of experience. The kind of data that could be received from such diverse input would be publicly available to anyone. And possibly, to translate any positive conclusions found within the system into the real world.