Thanks, Paulo. What a wonderful way for me to start a day with such a
nice suggestion! I am circulating this list among some of the others
in the GivingSpace circle for their comments. (01)
To all: Paulo discovered GivingSpace via surfing, and has volunteered
to help out with the technology. As an initial idea, I asked him for
some ideas on infrastructure to support our work and community
activities. He came up with the idea below. I've poked around
http://savannah.gnu.org/ as well as www.sourceforge.net and they seem
to have some tantalizing possibilities: (02)
Does it make sense to use this software as a tool to be modified for
managing uplift communities and projects? Could a new uplift community
register itself, akin to the way a new software project would register
itself in Savannah or SourceForge? Could this open up pathways for
development for community project management, detecting and
communicating patterns of uplift, social network connections, webs of
trust, topic maps, controlled vocabularies, RSS syndication, etc? Could
we call this an "Open Community Development System," substituting
"community" for "software?" Would this software be an acceptable
foundation for future development, and could we tap into the open source
(or free) community to help evolve the software? (03)
By the way, Networkforgood http://www.networkforgood.org offers free
donation processing for non-profits in the US only (for tax deduction
purposes.) They suggest an optional add-on donation to cover costs. The
charity needs to have an IRS non-profit tax number for this to work. (04)
I would very much like to hear other people's thoughts about Paolo's
ideas. (05)
Tom (06)
-----Original Message-----
From: Paolo Bizzarri [mailto:p.bizzarri@icube.it]
Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2003 12:36 AM
To: Tom Munnecke
Subject: Building communities and project (07)
Hi Tom, (08)
I have crunched around the problems you have proposed me yesterday, and
probably I have found a really nice solution (or at least, an
interesting
starting point). (09)
Did you see sites like Savannah (savannah.gnu.org) and SourceForge
(sourceforge.net). They are web sites for open source projects. (010)
Basically, the idea is that you can register yourself on the web site,
and
then you can start a project of your own. The web site provide you a set
of
simple but powerful services, like: (011)
- mailing list
- forums
- systems for tracking requests of support
- bug tracking systems
- systems for controlling source code (this is really useful for
developers)
- ftp sites
- project management
- documentation management. (012)
Each project can mantain its pages on the server, or it can have a link
to
another web site. (013)
Each project can classify itself under one or more catagories, so that
the
user of the web site can search (for example) for projects in Java for
business users. (014)
Each user can participate to one or more project, can publish his
profile
(with skills and so on), can request to be notified when something
changes on
a forum, some file is uploaded and so on. (015)
Last but not least, each project can produce one or more request for
help. So
you can search for a project manager, a developer, a document writer
and so
on. (016)
In my opinion, with a little renaming here and there, we can use the
system
for allowing communities to easily set up a project web site, and to
have a
set of practical tools for accomplishing their goals. Starting from this (017)
base, we could also develop more targeted tools (018)
For example we could develop a tool that allows a project to publish a
request for help for ten children in Iraq. (019)
At this point, ten visitors of the web site of this project (not
necessary
members of the project itself) can provide each one the requested fund,
via
for example Credit Card. (020)
As the money arrives to each of the children, we could provide feedback
on
what have happened and how things are progressing. (021)
What do you think ? (022)
Best regards. (023)
Paolo (024)
--
Paolo Bizzarri - President - Icube S.r.l.
Address: Via Ridolfi 15 - 56124 Pisa (PI), Italy
E-mail: p.bizzarri@icube.it Web: http://www.icube.it
Phone: (+39) 050 97 02 07 Fax: (+39) 050 31 36 588 (025)
--
This message is archived at: (026)
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