Help Develop An Open Projects Community Site

Cerb writes: "Open Projects sounded most appealing as I was on the prowl to find one of the many IRC networks to link my idle server to. Having been involved with the open source community for quite some time, it seemed to me to be the place to be. It just seemed 'right' to link there. Now I'm simply stuck with these people. They are exactly what I was looking for. But, when I decided to help out, little did I know that I would end up in a project manager position. So here I am, it's 12.24 am in Vienna, and I'm mulling how to phrase this best."

"OPN have thought a lot about the current development of community sites for the open source community. While we believe that sites like sourceforge and the like do a good job in their category, there are not enough project-related news sites.

We have decided that it is time to gather information, ideas and reminders from the open source community as to how they would like to have a site developed, that actually tells them, all in one place, what is going on with people in the community and the projects they work on.

So we're approaching the community, trying to gather as many contacts as possible and start discussing this idea we had during one long frenzied night of IRC brainstorming. Users who think they can help us out with ideas, development time, written content, information about the open source community and the like are asked to please participate and sign up to our mailing list at http://lists.openprojects.net. That same host runs an nntp server gatewayed to the mailing list archives, in the newsgroup opn.discussion. If you feel you are qualifying as a volunteer right away, you can sign up to our volunteer database using http://lists.openprojects.net/db/

Spreading the word is not easy and wording this right is even harder, so I will not try to make this sound any better. I'll just send it off, hoping that it gets posted and many join us. Should you have more specific questions, please join me on IRC. The server is irc.openprojects.net, the channel is #content.

oh yeah... I am dmalloc on IRC and right now I have quite a problem allocating more sanity.

cheers...

On behalf of dmalloc, lilo and the rest of the gang on irc.openprojects.net"

So who's up for this? I'd like to see a by-project community site that goes beyond the few excellent sites over at LinuxCare's Kernel Central, like Kernel Traffic, though I wonder how hard it will be to pull off an organizational task of this size.

Comments

We'd be glad to host such an effort

[pjones]

We have the resources (now thanks to relationships with IBM, VA Linux's Source Forge, Red Hat, Mandrake and the Center for the Public Domain) to host such a project or even different versions of the project. If you are seriously interested, drop me a note Paul Jones pjones@ibiblio.org.

This is one of the things that I feel we should be doing.

It's great to see interest!

[lilo]

Thanks to everyone who has shown interest so far. What we need more than anything at this point are graphical design people and people comfortable with the technical aspects of things like php and postgresql. Haven't nailed down the design yet, so input on that will be useful, though we do have some ideas. Try to have input on the desirability of the tools you know best.

What we need most, of course, is for people who have time, talent and interest to subscribe to the content contact list and suffer through the initial organizational throes. :)

We're not initially planning to do user forums. I think sites like Slashdot and K5 do as good a job of such things as it's possible to do, and I don't envy them the work that goes into it. What we plan to do is features on the state of people and projects in the community and articles on how the community can leverage its talents in positive ways. It's hoped we can contribute a very community-oriented site and possibly help finance the growth of OPN.

Hope to see you on the mailing list!

Rob Levin
Head of Operations, Open Projects Net
"Open source, open technology, open information"

open project site on an open project platform

[cluge]

There are a few good open progect "portal/slash" development tools. From the all encompassing zope to slash and php nuke. Why doesn't the new site do the following

• Come up with and build an open source management software to allow some of the participating users to design pages on the fly?
• Have on place where you can get GOOD descriptions of each kernel release changes (i.e. like Alan Cox's writing on the 2.2 kernel series)
• track number of downloads from sources like "source forge" and links from "fresh meat". Post the most and least downloaded programs by OS
• Obviously needs a web interface to irc!
• Also have a haters page where people that don't like your interface/ideas/code/moderation can have all their flames posted for other people to laugh at. (slash dot needs this badly)
• A news section so you can keep slashdot on their toes (competition breeds excellence)
• Release notes on FreeBSD, BeOS and other open source OSes?
• A hidden Porn section, reason......we're geeks, do we need a reason?

  • Just a couple of ideas, best of luck.

a lot of work

[Alien54]

Like anything worthwhile, this is going to be a lot of work.

So make sure you do not get blind sided by the commitments you find yourself making.

That being said, even helping out a little would probably be appreciated. For example, maybe something like hosting a server or a slashcode site, etc. so that the front line troops can focus on the work at hand.

of course, it is best to check with them to see what is really needed and wanted.

Sounds like what they could use are a couple of extra assistant leaders

;-)

Am I the only one...

[OlympicSponsor]

...who think that at least one paragraph was left out of this story? I have literally NO idea what he is talking about. I see a bunch of references to "Open Projects" and I see some answers that reference website software. Other than that, I have zero clue. If this were K5, I'd vote "-1 Dump it" with an editorial saying "rewrite to make clearer".
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