Actions?

[Aral Balkan]

How should we proceed?

I'm looking into setting up a MediaWiki at devrights.org – is this a
good idea? Or other thoughts?

Suggested next steps:

1. Gather list of anecdotes of events where what should be basic
developer rights have been disregarded by API providers
2. Create a _basic_ list of developer's rights that API providers can
subscribe to (e.g., Bill of Developer's Rights)
3. Create a Developer Friendly logo/image that APIs that support the
Bill of Developer's Rights can display.
4. Rank/rate existing APIs based on how developer friendly they are
(like an ethical rating for real-world products).

And/Or ..? Thoughts?

[Stuart Herbert]

Sounds like a good plan.  Can I also suggest putting together a list of why each right is important to developers?  API providers might be more willing to sign up to #devrights if they understand the benefits of meeting each of the items in the bill of rights.

Best regards,

Stu

--

--
--
Stuart Herbert

e: stu...@stuartherbert.com
t: +44 7966 284577
w: http://www.stuartherbert.com/
b: http://blog.stuartherbert.com/

[Pelle Wessman]

An alternative might be a WordPress-blog on that domain and a GitHub-
account with forkable repos containing the actual reference bill of
rights.

Wikis can be complex and confusing - raising the barriers for
participation. The forkability added by GitHub instead makes it really
easy to contribute. The Activity Streams communities already use
GitHub-repos for their development so it's a proven way of developing
a "specification": http://github.com/activitystreams

I suggest that all discussions are held on this list, all conclusions
are being committed to a GitHub-repo and all milestones are being
blogged about on devrights.org.

/ Pelle

[Ross Ritchey]

Also, the document itself could be a public Google Doc, or could be
built as a Wave. Either way, everyone could be in editing it
simultaneously, seeing each other's edits as they happen.

I do agree that Wiki's can be complex and confusing, and will likely
lower participation.

[Aral Balkan]

Gotcha, Wiki bad.

I was looking into Wave but it still confuses the heck out of me and I
couldn't get it to embed correctly (maybe cos I was testing from
localhost:8888?)

I like the github idea :)

Aral

[Robert Turrall]

Hm, and I'd just about figured Wiki out... now I have to figure out github ;)

I think the blog approach sound ok, for anecdotes and maybe "reporting progress" on the actual bill of rights and other documents - this will need multiuser blogging capabilities I guess. Does Wordpress do this? If not, try b2evolution. Everybody who has a contribution can then be signed up with an account to author articles/posts.

The end result of efforts should be a set of solid documents that can be easily read, distributed and managed. github or whatever sounds ideal for this.

Let's just not get into creating our own API....

[Aral Balkan]

I'm open to setting up space for this on my server + giving people the keys.

Aral

[Fending]

So wordpress was cast as an option, but I saw "drupal" a few times in
the intros thread, including my own. Any general aversion to using
drupal? No offense taken @aral if you want to keep this dead simple ~
the architecture is already a little distributed with discussions here
+ github repos, so a blog alone may just cut it.

But if we want to do anything cool with pimped out user profiles and
community interaction there either now or down the line, a drupal cms
instance could accomplish it quite handily (again, either now or later
- no reason not to switch over down the line if that needs to be the
case). It seems like we have some hands to do it now, though.
Thoughts?

On May 13, 12:31 pm, Aral Balkan <a...@aralbalkan.com> wrote:
> I'm open to setting up space for this on my server + giving people the keys.
>
> Aral
>
>
>
> On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 4:08 PM, Robert Turrall <rob...@turrall.net> wrote:
> > Hm, and I'd just about figured Wiki out... now I have to figure out github
> > ;)
>
> > I think the blog approach sound ok, for anecdotes and maybe "reporting
> > progress" on the actual bill of rights and other documents - this will need
> > multiuser blogging capabilities I guess. Does Wordpress do this? If not, try
> > b2evolution. Everybody who has a contribution can then be signed up with an
> > account to author articles/posts.
>
> > The end result of efforts should be a set of solid documents that can be
> > easily read, distributed and managed. github or whatever sounds ideal for
> > this.
>
> > Let's just not get into creating our own API....
>
> > Aral Balkan wrote:
>
> > Gotcha, Wiki bad.
>
> > I was looking into Wave but it still confuses the heck out of me and I
> > couldn't get it to embed correctly (maybe cos I was testing from
> > localhost:8888?)
>
> > I like the github idea :)
>
> > Aral
>

> > On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 4:39 PM, Ross Ritchey <theboyofsp...@gmail.com>

[Aral Balkan]

I have no objections/technology choice – it would be great if we could
have a _very simple_ system that didn't require any learning/or large
up-front commitment to use to encourage as much participation as
possible.

Aral

[Pelle Wessman]

I'm a professional Drupal developer as well - but I would say that Drupal is a bit overkill for what we need.
I think a simple blog is enough for our purpose and WordPress does that much better than Drupal right now.

/ Pelle

[Scott Wilcox]

+1.

Simple wordpress installation will suffice for now.

Scott.

Scott Wilcox

t: +44 (0) 7538 842418
+1 (646) 257 0580
e: sc...@dor.ky
w: http://dor.ky
http://synfinaty.com

[Fending]

Good discussion. @Pelle: You're right, it requires effort to make
Drupal simple. (That's my business model! :) Deploying Drupal out of
the box as a "solution" is a worst practice. I digress.

Anyway, I can imagine an established future where we want this to do
more stuff (user profiles, "badge management", lists of participating
vendors/APIs drillable by various criteria, etc.), but those things
aren't reqs right now, for sure. That's sort of why I asked for
opinion. When they are, there's a non-WP solution that's equally
simple (seriously) with very little dev effort.

cheers!/@fending

>  smime.p7s
> 5KViewDownload

[Aral Balkan]

Idea: site/campaign - Burned By (take on "Powered By") where people
share their stories + name and shame the API providers involved. Kind
of like the anecdote thread but en masse.

Aral

Sent from my iPhone