Great Idea! Would my idea fit as well?

[Tane Piper]

Hey there,

Through upcoming.org I found out about Elgg, seeing that you have an
event coming up soon, I thought I should check it out, and found the
ODD.

Scarily, it's very similar to an idea I've been sitting on for a while
now, but never really started working on for various reasons, so I'd
like to run my idea behind by you to see if it would work well within
ODD?

A little background first - about a year ago I was working on a Django
project called hgfront, it was a web based front end for Mercurial
repositories. This was before Github was launched, and unfortunately
the project stalled (though luckly someone took up the torch and
created bitbucket.org using some of our ideas).

One of the ideas was the eXtended Developer Network protocol (XDN)
which was a JSON based profile, similar to ODD. Within the profile, a
user would have their standard user data, plus several other features:

* Open Source Projects that they worked on
* Key language skills that they have
* Experience with environments/packages

Alongside features like these, the user would have two scores - a self
score, so this would be something like "I vote myself an 8 at PHP" and
a reputation score - "other people think I am a 6 at PHP".

The idea is that with distributed development, your author profile
became as distributable as the code. If someone clones a repo with
your commits, your author profile would be taken with it.

The snagging point for me was how to make this data portable, but at
the same time allow a user to have a central URL, maybe attached to an
OpenID, that has their profile data. There would need to be some kind
of passback mechanism as people review your code. Maybe the
definition file could contain a URL fixed back to the service that you
use that supports say a REST request to add updated data.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them - and I should be at
the Edinburgh Elgg meeting - it looks a very interesting package and
we have a lot of clients who are looking at social media, so it may be
a good fit for some upcoming projects.

Thanks,
--
Tane Piper
http://digitalspaghetti.me.uk

email/gtalk: ta...@digitalspaghetti.me.uk
skype: digitalspaghetti
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