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ideas for the next new improved version of the SoftwareBazaar

http://taoriver.net/img/for_cw/project-space.png


Linas Vepstas lists "Call Center, Bug Tracking and Project Management Tools". Which of them would make a good addition to the Software Bazaar Software?


SoftwareBazaar

You say “One of those ideas is custom software for the bazaar itself”.

I’m interested in this because I like almost everything about Wikis except the syntax. I would like to discuss an alternate approach where:

No CamelCase? or knowledge of the wiki’s history is needed. The question/comment is written in normal written language. After submission all document names within the wiki (whether one or many words long) become links within that document.
I would also like to make back links automatic and sorted by relevancy.
I have a rough version written in Emacs Lisp that may help communicate the concept.
I would suggest you go to my web page, but it is out of date and emotionally charged. I have since (finally) realized most people don’t want to hear of problems or have critical discussions about important issues. I have lost 2 friends (one of which told me they would attempt to have me fired if ever spoke to him again) because of my caustic honesty.

– PatrickAnderson?

Great. I’m excited that I’m getting feedback so rapidly, even before I’ve had a chance to set up RecentChanges and the SideBar. I’m glad I didn’t wait until I had a “proper” web server set up and debugged. – DavidCary

I hope you’ll be exited to know that one of your ideas -- [WikiFeatures:AutoLink] -- has already been implemented -- see http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/GaGaParser .


Sorry, but GaGa? doesn’t accomplish this because it requires _‘s between the words of Titles containing spaces. This may not seem important, but the point is that authors should not need to know about definitions, those definitions should simply become apparent when the page is rendered. This allows all and any text to be linked together similar to the way an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) allows you to ‘jump’ to the definition of variables or functions. See http://www.communitywiki.org/en/PlainLink for a more thorough but still incomplete description.

Ah, I didn’t know that. The page WikiFeatures:AutoLink tricked me into thinking someone had actually tried it, but users didn’t like it after all. I see now that GaGa? was only a partial implementation. The full implementation (link words and phrases completely automatically) has yet to be tried. – DavidCary


more ideas for improving the SoftwareBazaar:

(Should we think of a more inclusive name, so people understand it’s for people building new software and figuring out how to use existing software for new tasks, not only buying and selling software ?)

micropayments and currency

Initially, DavidCary expects to run the Software Bazaar on a gift economy.

What do we need to do to make that successful? (What can we learn from Linux, Wikipedia, http://stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/ , Folding@Home, Amazon reviews, and other successful – and also less-successful – gift economy projects? )

Later, we could allow people to pay programmers to write and maintain code. Perhaps even allow programmers to pay people to write clear and well-written bug reports / enhancement requests. I’ll be really excited if people get paid to work on open-source projects (perhaps using the StreetPerformerProtocol?). (Although even then I expect many projects to remain non-monetary). How to gracefully make the transition ? Perhaps start with some arbitrary worthless local currency, such as eTerra, and allow people to set their own exchange rate, such as what happened on Everquest ?

What sorts of anti-fraud protection mechanisms can we use that are trustworthy, and that allow people to verify that they are trustworthy ?

How can we enable MicroPayment ?

Rather than “hard security” systems, I think it would be interesting to try “soft security”, “voluntary payment” plans such as Community:PayExpected.

other ideas

voo2do http://voo2do.com/ looks interesting. “Free … advanced task and priority management for busy, ambitious individuals”. Should the Software Bazaar use it? Or incorporate some of its good features into the Software Bazaar?


What say we use the "To Do queue" convention here?

At first glance, I expected “[ ]” to be “to do”, and “[X]” to be “done” – exactly the opposite of this protocol. Perhaps [!] for hi-priority would be better?


For the next revision of the Software Bazaar, consider using the Trac open source project. “Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects.” It’s already being used for tux4kids.net development.


“… Code embedded in wiki … a make script could easily crawl a wiki picking up various pieces of code, data in order to build source files, config files, etc. … It could save the various components in their traditional places before calling the compiler. … does seem like the ultimate in Bazaar-style development.” -- Wiki:ProgrammingInWiki


“Snippets is a public source code repository.” http://TextSnippets.com/ includes short bits of code in many, many computer programming languages.

Any relation to

DZone Snippets http://snippets.dzone.com/ “DZone Snippets … a public source code repository. Easily build up your personal collection of code snippets, categorize them with tags / keywords, and share them with the world”.


“In Praise of Tweaking: A Wiki-like Programming Contest” by Ned Gulley, The MathWorks?, Inc. http://www.starchamber.com/gulley/pubs/tweaking/tweaking.html

sounds very similar to my vision for the SoftwareBazaar: Post code publicly online, and make it easy for people to make improvements. – DavidCary

The Emacs Wiki has a special formatting rule that highlights pages containing Emacs Lisp appropriately. Thus, anybody can post code, and others can make improvements. Take a look at a random example from RecentChanges. – Main:AlexSchroeder


Launchpad ( https://launchpad.net/ ) and Malone, the Launchpad bug tracker already do at least some of what I envisioned the Software Bazaar would do.


“Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art – and share your creations on the web.” http://scratch.mit.edu/


promises to pay

We have a list of promises to pay for software at SoftwarePeopleWant.

The page SoftwareBazaarSoftware: “micropayments and currency” discusses some possible ways to handle money.

The current Software Bazaar doesn’t yet have the proper setup to securely and reliably handle currency and “promises to pay”. However, instead of waiting for new SoftwareBazaarSoftware web site to be set, we can already handle “promises to pay” projects now, using the following process:

(Thank you, LionKimbro. – DavidCary)


The "computer programming" section of Kasamba has some similarities to the software bazaar I visualized. There seem to be a lot of people listed, each one with a per-minute pay rate. Anything we can learn from them? Is there any way to improve on their micropayment system?

If we decide not to compete head-on with Kasamba, I suppose we should explicitly list what sorts of things we do that Kasamba can’t do (and vice versa), and try to send people back and forth to the most appropriate site.


"Is Amazon's Mechanical Turk a Failure?" by by Jeff Atwood has an interesting discussion on “extrinsic rewards” vs. “intrinsic rewards”; refers to Mary Poppendieck (who wrote “Team Compensation”) and Alfie Kohn (who wrote the book “Punished by Rewards”).


further reading

discussion

I see that micropledge officially launched 2007-Aug. Excellent! – DavidCary

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