Thanks Jim
So after a rigorous democratic process where the many pros and cons of various approaches were considered, it was determined that the first BrigadeWorks project will be on hacking Discourse.
What is Discourse? Why it?
Discourse is modern forum software. Along with email, irc chat and web sites, that is one of the traditional foundations of the internet.
Any business or group of folk with a shared interest could use experience in hosting and customizing forum software and yet most forum software was written ages ago and has not caught up with modern internet needs. Any one of us can host a community of a couple hundred users on Digital Ocean for about $20 a month and the Discourse team provides free hosting to Open Source and Civic Minded projects in some cases.
It is an open source project that has significant client, server, hosting and marketing aspects, so whether you are a businessman, a sysadmin, a client side specialist or a ruby guru, there will be a way in which you can bring your expertise to the project to both teach and learn from others.
Many of our other ideas could work within the envelope of customizing Discourse anyway, integrating an rss reader with discourse or creating a recommendation engine for threads that you might be interested in based on what you've read in the past, for example.
On wednessday I'll have a short presentation introducing discourse ready if folk are interested in it, as well as detailed instructions on how to set up a development environment which we can go through and execute as a group.
I'll also have a list of small 10 minute presentation ideas that folk can choose from to help out with no time pressure or deadline. Just for some point in the next six months.
For now here are a few links for the curious.
Discourse (site)
Jeff Atwood on
Forums and the Origin of Discourse (screencast)
Brainstorming on
Plugin ideas for Discourse (developer forum thread)
Finally because Discourse is a significant real world project, it's often a good window to view emerging technology trends through. There is a lot of snake oil out there in our world, a lot of entropy to surf and always trade offs to understand in detail. Here are four blog posts that respectively highlight interesting facets of our technology landscape through their real world experiences.
Jeff Atwood on
"Why Ruby"Sam Saffron with some interesting details about
websocketsRobin Ward on the trade offs between
traditional ember vs virtual dom based viewsThe pros and cons of
graphql vs rest using Discourse as a reference point
See you folk there!