A honest community website for boostrappers

[iHiD]

Hi guys,

It was great to meet you all at the conference last week. 

In the closing session I mentioned the idea of a website where we post our projects and ideas for honest feedback in a controlled, non-trolling environment. It would also form the centre of our non-VC skill network. I'm happy to start developing this, but want to make sure people actually feel it's a good idea before starting work. This is the first opportunity to tell me if my baby is beautiful or horrifically ugly! Please be honest! :-)

This is a very quick/rough brainstorm of how the site could work.

• A closed community that we can invite other trusted bootstrappers to.
  
• Profiles for individuals outlining our skills.
• Project pages containing:
  
• The project vision
• Progress so far.
• Skills required.
• "Is this bit a good idea?" style questions and answers with the ability to add screenshots etc.
• The ability to search for people with specific skills.
• A way of organising events for bootstrappers (there are obviously other good event management services. Do any of them have APIs to do this sort of thing?)

That's enough to get started with. So, three questions:

• Which bits do you like?
  
• Which bits are you skeptical of?
• Do you want to help me make it and if so, how would you like to help? (Designer, developer, organiser etc)

Thanks,

Jeremy (iHiD)

[Matt Wynne]

Hi Jeremy,

It does sound like quite a bit of work. Wouldn't this google group suffice for most of these needs? We could use a sticky thread for people's posts about their projects, for example.

cheers,

Matt

--
Freelance programmer & coach
Author, http://pragprog.com/book/hwcuc/the-cucumber-book
Founder, http://www.relishapp.com/
Twitter, https://twitter.com/mattwynne

[Andy Goundry]

I have to agree with Matt. I'd also recommend waiting to see how much (and how) the community communicate before considering a tool. It feels a little early days at the mo, especially considering we have this google group to support us now.

Cheers

Andy 

[Klaas Jan Wierenga]

+1 Google group looks like an MVP to me ;-)

Thoroughly enjoyed bootstrapd last week! Hope I can contribute albeit from some geographical distance. 

Sent from my iPhone

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[despo]

Hi Jeremy,

Personally, I was sold on the idea the moment you mentioned it.

I was thinking it would be interesting to have an open source bootstrap community project so that the sole responsibility of maintaining it is not left to one person. (If you could also plug in travis and automerge pull requests, as long as the tests are passing, it could do for a nice social coding experiment! - but let's leave this to the side for now) 

In the closing session I mentioned the idea of a website where we post our projects and ideas for honest feedback in a controlled, non-trolling environment. It would also form the centre of our non-VC skill network. I'm happy to start developing this, but want to make sure people actually feel it's a good idea before starting work. This is the first opportunity to tell me if my baby is beautiful or horrifically ugly! Please be honest! :-)

This is a very quick/rough brainstorm of how the site could work.

• A closed community that we can invite other trusted bootstrappers to.
  

Invitations to get in, is one way of doing this, but why not also enable people who want to enter, request entry, explain why they would like to join, provide some social net info (twitter handle) and people who are already part of the community grant them access.
 

• Profiles for individuals outlining our skills.

Tags could work for this. Or use the LinkedIn api (https://developer.linkedin.com/documents/profile-api). Personally, I am not a big fan of LinkedIn, just wondering if that is the style of info you think should be there

• Project pages containing:
  
• The project vision
• Progress so far.
• Skills required.
• "Is this bit a good idea?" style questions and answers with the ability to add screenshots etc.

 Project vision and ability to respond is all needed for this to kick off. 

• The ability to search for people with specific skills.
• A way of organising events for bootstrappers (there are obviously other good event management services. Do any of them have APIs to do this sort of thing?)

Through usage, you should be able to identify if people do care for these features. At the moment, the community is tiny anyway, you should be able to post asking for people with skills and get responses.
 

That's enough to get started with. So, three questions:

• Which bits do you like?
  
• Which bits are you skeptical of?
• Do you want to help me make it and if so, how would you like to help? (Designer, developer, organiser etc)

Thanks,

Jeremy (iHiD)

if you do kick this off, I would love to be a collaborator. :)  I am developer!

Thanks,
Despo

[Jon Rowe]

Start an organisation and repo on github and then go from there? Then people can contribute as and when?

Jon Rowe

-----------------------------

ma...@jonrowe.co.uk

http://jonrowe.co.uk

[Jeremy Walker]

Thanks for all your thoughts, both positive and negative.

I personally don't like Google Groups. I only find them useful for email lists and I think there is potential here for more than that. I therefore don't think Google Groups can easily act as an MVP as I'm foreseeing a different product. 

I'll put an organisation together on Github and throw an empty Rails app into a project for us to use. I can probably spend a day hacking on this over the weekend so if people have anything they think would be a good place to start, let me know!

Do people have any preference on a tool to manage this? Does Github issues suffice?

Thanks,

Jeremy

[Despo Pentara]

+1 github issues

[Jon Rowe]

+1 github issues + pull requests ;)

Jon Rowe

-----------------------------

ma...@jonrowe.co.uk

http://jonrowe.co.uk

On Tuesday, 3 July 2012 at 14:16, Despo Pentara wrote:

+1 github issues