The begniing will be NanoCommunity!
Amjad
Yesterday was surely an important meeting. I'll try to sum up the
results for those who where not able to attend and for the purpose of
documenting the evolution of the project.
We decided to implement a simple version of the idea of
MicroCommunity. So we'll have a single website which is considered as
a global repository of different basic types of content (e.g. wiki
pages, Q&As, bookmarks...). There is an important feature which is
groups that provide similar social experience to Facebook. The special
thing about these groups is that content created inside these groups
is automatically aggregated into the main repository of content.
So imagine two specialized groups called "Ruby on Rails" and "Agile
development". Each group will create a lot of wiki pages, questions
and bookmarks. You can access the content of each group from its page.
Members of the Rails group might discover interesting pages in the
Agile group and vice versa. A foreign visitor will be able to explore
all the pages throughout a portal. For example he can access the page
'http://example.com/wiki/Test_Driven_Design' which was originally
produced in the Agile group and improved further in the Rails group.
We called this idea NanoCommunity! Since we are applying the idea of
MicroCommunity on the scale of one website. We hope that using Linked
Data and Federated social web will allow the idea to much more
beneficial. However, we'll first try to make something working for now
for us to be able to get feedback from users and see how much actually
our idea is good.
Since a lot of us isn't familiar with Rails yet, we organized
ourselves into micro-teams! Each microteam will try to implement
portions of the models we'll need later, and practice learning by
doing. MhdSyrwan and I will try to make the core functionalities ready
so the rest of the teams can start to contribute and merge their code.
Once we've implemented the NanoCommunity, we'll try to integrate our
app with Facebook, Wikipedia and Github. We think that would allow
more user engagement.
We think this first experiment will be a good test of the idea. We
don't want to start from the beginning using advanced Linked Data or
federated social web ideas in order not to fall in the trap of
over-engineering.
We'll keep you updated with the new repository once we've made it!
Have fun coding and getting used to the Rails way!
Amjad