Beyond SourceForge

From RCC 2007

In attendance: Kevin Turner, Michael Maranda, Gerry Gleason, Michael Buland, John Hartman, Arthur Brock, Mickki Langston, Alex Malinovich (and a few others)

Also view SourceTree for more context for the conversation

The purpose of our topic is to get feedback about a scheme that is in its genesis

The ways we've worked together in the past have expired.

If you look at how source forge works, it deals with all projects as stand-alone, proprietary software. But in an open source world, nothing is stand-alone. Everything evolves and is related. What would it be like to have a space that supports that work?

The working title is: SourceTree. Looking at it from a geneological approach. View parents, children, cousins, etc. Being able to site project influences, etc. "Families" of software where you can borrow modules from different applications and use elsewhere- more efficient use of the code, etc.

What we're looking for is feedback about community aspects:

how do you make decisions?

how do you make it natural for a group who has a new purpose branch off and work on their new purposed-project?

See where we have to invest efforts, where we shouldn't duplicate efforts. SourceForge is overwhelming and there's no good way to map the project space. SourceTree is about mapping.

So what would make this kind of community tool useful or not useful?

Think of a few projects where the geneology would be useful, especially Libraries. But then see lots of situations where I can see the effort would be for nothing but a footnote later. Has this been considered? Is it worth building?

Gerry thinks the wiki concept is brilliant for the community part

SourceForge has a thing where when you create your login, you list your skills so that projects can find you. But with this, people can trace tree and see where the skills/developers are. A living data base of your person skills.

See this kind of thing moving beyond code. Digital media libraries. If you had this structure, it would be 1: interesting to creative commons attributes, etc

This has a lot to do with how we work and create things beyond just software. We're interested in finding ways to collaborate with geeks, and this would support that.

Also, want to tap into collective intelligence of the group. Beyond just bugs and feature requests. Being able to have a slashdot rating sort of way; tap into intelligence and support community decision making.

Concerns voiced about how voting systems don't really work. Perhaps create a weighted system where people who are bigger contributors to the community, their feedback is seen higher.

If you can make it enough easier for users to give feedback about my software and how it's being used, that would be very valuable.

suck in RSS feed from geeky project site so the info on the sourcetree site is up-to-date and correct.

CVS check in - goes out on RSS feed; can see human writing in addition to code updates

what if you had something with more open API so you could use which ever bug reporting, source tracking software you wanted, but that it feeds into the sourcetree site for a central place / storage of info and collaboration

Creates a need to track unit testing and API and tools that are becoming more standard tools

people don't use source forge because the tools are great, but because they give server space and bandwidth

Also, it would be extremely valuable to connect developers with Power users and testers, who make development 10 times faster

Alternatives to sourceforge:

http://alioth.debian.org

http://freshmeat.net

Ubuntu https://launchpad.net/

Savannah http://savannah.gnu.org/

Another thing about sourceforge (from Mike B) Sourceforge has the fewest requirements and they give you bandwidth, mirrors, diskspace, but to use some projects/tools, you have to be a part of the network or group to be able to use them (like subversion), and the platform itself isn't open.

Other features that would be useful:

sourceforge provides no tools to help with work flow - so, implement code review

sourceforge has no way to back up your project

do they support mailing list archive and issue tracker? (backups?) (nope)

Another reason to have the open standards - to be able to insert and access data. A full API would allow mirroring off the main site and even make the main site secondary.

Boink - peer to peer sharing of CPU's for collaborative research (opensource)