Help conceive open source collaboration in 2010
As 2010 begins, I want to ask: What encourages you to work on Free Software today — writing/fixing software, documentation, and translations? What would encourage you in the future?
When it comes to collaboration in FLOSS, most of the attention is directed toward tools: bug trackers, version control systems, mailing lists, IRC. What has received less focus are the incentives which encourage use of these tools in the first place.
Some ideas
We’ve been thinking about what we can do to motivate collaboration. Here are our favorite plans:
You Scratch My Bug, I’ll Scratch Yours: Nominate five Free Software bugs that annoy the willikers out of you. Then your friends can tackle the bugs you hate, and vice versa.
Action Alerts: Project maintainers publish action alerts for their projects. (“Download and test the latest version!” “Help us write documentation about our new feature.”) Users accumulate karma for responding to action alerts. We think this would encourage involvement better than project mailing lists do.
Skill Trade: List what you want for your project and what you’re willing to do to get it. (“I’ll code some Python for your project if you write some documentation for mine.”) Execute trades; feel awesome.
Personal Planet Feed: Read in one place a personalized list of blog entries from across FLOSS that matches your profile — your areas of interest and favorite writers. (This would extend the Planet concept started by Planet GNOME.) Naturally we would emit this as an RSS/Atom feed, too.
Facebook Badge: Show your FLOSS pride on the Book o’ Face. Display a list of projects you contribute to with a simple, non-nauseating Facebook app.
At the moment, we’re working on adding location support to OpenHatch profiles. By the end of the month, you’ll be able to set your location and see others nearby. Then, if someone near you wants to hack on Python, and you’re looking for a new contributor for your Python project, we’ll help you two find each other. Or you can organize a larger local meet-up.
Your ideas?
We’re open to suggestions: if you have any other ideas, let us know! Just leave a comment below. (Or reach us privately.)
If you like any of our ideas, retweet us or redent us with your choice. Or vote here: http://selectricity.org/quickvote/openhatch2010.
We may roll some of these out on a limited basis. Leave a comment if you’d like to participate in any particular idea!
A personal planet feed would be pretty neat. I mean, in a sense I am already doing that, setting up rss feeds on my computer from a selection of people I am interested in. What would be more interesting than just “picking” a list of people I am interested in is picking a list *for me* based on a set of say, tagged interests: I’m interested in python & blender, but maybe I don’t know about everyone in the python and blender world. So informing me of such people would be cool.
idea: show off your website, being all valid open web tech.
the ideas mentioned are really good. they will surely encourage user participation and creative collaboration. i particularly like action alert coz you get to sample the project.
As a professional software developer working as a contractor, showing my skills is very important.
Ohloh concentrates on code committed by yourself. This works for projects on which you are deeply involved (core committer), but not on projects on which you are an occasional contributor and where you contribute bug reports and patches.
Also it would be interesting to be informed about events (hackatons, conferences) in my area.