What does a Collaborative WebSite Need?

[Michael J. Fuhrman]

All,

Please consider what you would like one website to have in order to
collaborate effectively with your fellow freelancer's and
entrepreneurs. This may require some of you to think outside the box
as you may not have considered that a baker might be interested in
using Collaboration Alley to connect with Caterers and Marketers to do
business. Or that a first time small business might need to connect
with a Business Coach. Or that a For Profit School might need to
connect with a Programmer to build a new student announcement
website. These are just some of the businesses that I would like us
to consider when thinking about all the various business functions
that might be needed to make collaboration a reality here in
cyberspace. =)

Some business functionality that I think would be helpful I've broken
down here:

Public Calendar - a place where everyone can post marketing events
concerning their company.

Global Calendar - contains all the intern and extern events that the
company uses to drive their product promotional and sales campaigns
from.

Primary Business Activities: Sales & Production, Marketing, and
Research and Development

Secondary Business Activities (these support the primary
activities) ... Accounting, Facilities, IT, Shipping & Recieving,
Employees, HR, Project Management, Owner / Director, Board of
Governors, ...

External Business Activities (these support the organization and
usually can't be brought in house) ... Federal, State and local
Government Agencies; Shipping (Logistic Services), Legal, TeleComm,
Insurance, Banking, Suppliers, ..

Just in this list alone there are quite a few business models that we
are looking at, and yet, almost every business needs these pieces to
work properly. What I'm proposing is that we create a site that
consolidates these components into a one stop shop.

Most of these services already exist scattered throughout various
websites. Google, Meet Up, Constant Contacts, Quick Books, Sales
Force, FaceBook, Word Press, .... But this is a lot for one person to
work with, and it's not all integrated into one system. So, the
process of running a business becomes time consuming instead of being
fluid.

So I want to take this problem of Creating a Business that freelancers
and small business entrepreneurs have, along with connecting with
other people and make it 100 times simpler. A one stop shop. Come
in, describe what, create an inventory, sell your services to other
(inside and outside the website), market yourself, get help marketing
if needed, meet with others to build new products, or work on
projects, and at the end of the year, press a button and yoru taxes
are done for you. =)

That's the vision ... take a complex problem of building and running a
business and make it simple.

[David]

I think the best thing would be to mashup Git/Gist, Facebook, Meetup,
Google Apps and StackOverflow. All the pieces are there - just
interconnect them around the theme.

[Michael J. Fuhrman]

Do we want to build these piece or just coble them together?

[David]

I don't have a complete deployment plan yet - I would want to get a
bunch of bright people around the table and see what kind of a plan
emerges.

If I were to do this solo I would create a digester and connective
engine in Node.js that tracks and indexes the disparate pieces in
MongoDB; however that might not be the most easily maintained platform
for the participants so I'm kind of hedging my bets on a deployment
architecture til I get everyone in the same room and we can find the
most team-efficient base to work off of. I have a sinking feeling
it'll be Drupal.

[David]

To be a little clearer in responding to the question - I would rather
adapt the current software package offerings in Meetup, GitHub and
StackOverflow than reverse engineer them: I don't see us producing
much improvement over the existing offerings and their APIs do lend
themselves to a mashup.

There will be the need to customize a central hub of some sort that
feeds into these services; how to accomplish this central hub should
be talked about by the participants as there is no one perfect engine
for this sort of thing and we would want to use a codebase that
includes the current skillsets of as many participants as possible.
I'd guess that Ruby, Drupal, Zend Framework, Google App Engine and
Node are all fine candidates for this sort of thing, and there are
probably possibilities beyond these that would work.