Once again, I’d been thinking of making a blog post about what I’m working on (short version: I’m taking a break from REST configuration (I’ll leave the puns as an exercise for the reader) to work on what basically amounts to a server-side optimization for the Vespucci project) but I find myself more interested in this discussion on the OpenCore dev list. I thought about making this post an email to that list, but the comments I’m planning to make are basically tangential to the thread there.
What I take away from that thread is that we the OpenCore developers are planning on making people on openplans.org more like projects, with their own featurelets (mailing lists and task trackers and such) to go along with the wiki that’s currently provided. This seems kind of weird to me; as my understanding is that openplans.org is about projects and making it easy for groups with similar goals to collaborate and share skillsets and experience. It’s not clear to me how letting a person track personal tasks or run a personal blog is helping to accomplish that. Instead, I would think a generalization of my earlier thoughts on blogging would be more appropriate: have tabs on the user account page for each of the available featurelets, but show them as a filter on the entire site rather than unique content. So, the task tracker tab would show only tasks assigned to the user, the mailing lists tab would show threads the user participated in, etc. That would let you see things from a people-oriented point of view without creating this kind of island of content where the user has their own personal stuff on a site that’s supposedly intended to help them share with others.
Of course, I have no idea whether this really makes sense. I often find that ways of doing things that make sense to me are kind of lost on non-developers (like when I bitch to Windows users about how hard it is to change file extensions on their platform and they stare blankly and wonder what possible reason you could have to want to do that). But, I’m not a developer on OpenCore so hopefully my perspective on things isn’t too tainted by elbow grease.
Another thought that occurred to me while thinking about this is that if people are projects, and people can be members of projects, then OpenCore obviously supports having projects as members of projects. This excited me more than a little (being a computer geek, I of course love hierarchies!) I think if that sort of nesting of projects is allowed then you can structure things in a way that makes a lot of sense. For example, you can have an Organization be an entity recognized by openplans.org in the same way that People and Projects currently are. An Organization could probably be nearly identical to a Person, but with some string changes (an organization has a logo, not a photo, and services rather than skills, etc.) Of course you can’t log in as an organization either. Organizations and Projects could have as members People, Projects, or other Organizations (think of local chapters or subdivisions for Organization->Organization, and planning committees for Project->Organization) ), and People wouldn’t be allowed to have any members, of course. The neat thing that I see here is that the membership wouldn’t have to be exclusive; in the same way that People can be members of multiple Projects, Projects could be sponsored by multiple Organizations. Organizations could have multiple parent Organizations as well (like Geoserver could be both a subdivision of TOPP and a member of OpenGIS).
Anyway, like I said I’m not really aware enough of OpenPlans to know whether any of what I said is really applicable. To follow in the recent trend of posts on what success is for openplans, I’d say it’s probably not measured by how well the software models the relationship between people, projects, and organizations 
But I do think that modeling them well makes it easier to present them in a navigable way (that is, making it easier to find projects that are related in the types of ways our software knows about). If our goal for openplans.org is to bring projects together, then it’s probably a step in the right direction.
Hm, I wasn’t really sure about the category for this post so I used a bunch
What’s the difference between design and architecture?
Comment by cdwinslow on December 5, 2007 at 9:38 pm
+1 to personal featurelets being a bit of a bad idea. I think it’s parallel to the site’s goals at best, and there are more productive ways of making it easy for users to try our tools.
I should probably expand on that a bit. David, you’ve already voiced my main objection: we’re supposed to be building collaborative tools for groups, not personal tools for people. I’d be really concerned, if we started doing this, that we’d start trying to tailor our tools for personal use based on the user feedback which would just push them more and more away from our actual targeted use case.
And, anyway, we shouldn’t be competing with Blooger…
Comment by ejucovy on December 6, 2007 at 8:32 am
I think you raise some really interesting questions here, and as you did last time, you are looking at this from a slightly different angle than the rest of us, which is really helpful.
Re: people as projects — I’d like to make a slight clarification of what we’ve been discussing. The main motivation behind being more “people-focused,” as we’ve discussed, is not necessarily to make people the primary unit of stuff (meaning that people === projects). We want to make people stand out more, and make the user’s homepage a more interesting & useful place. I _really_ like the idea of things like task lists being filtered in from projects & groups that a person belongs to, and I think the general question of user-specific features vs. filters is one that deserves a lot more discussion. I suspect that the final answer will be some sort of hybrid.
For example, in the case of vacuum, we’re trying to create a community of people around streetsblog, where we can “promote” anonymous or name & email-only commenters into “members” of nycstreets. In this case, it’s not necessarily about having them join a project (although that’s obviously a goal), but just having them become part of the community (with their streetsblog comments filtered in) is an important first step.
Re: projects belonging to projects and projects as groups / organizations, I think you’re definitely on target here. This is something that we’ve been talking about a lot lately, and it definitely ties in with the longer-term goals of openplans as a platform for organizing people. In many cases we’ve experienced so far, the ability to relate projects to each other this way has been desired (TOPP, OpenPlans, NYCSR, UWSSR, etc.).
Related to that is the move towards other types of groupings of people (projects as “groups”, “events” or “organizations”). This shift seems (fairly) simple from a tech POV, and combined with group-group relationships, allows OpenPlans to organize people in much more useful ways.
Comment by nickyg on December 6, 2007 at 10:38 am
I like the idea of organizations. I think when we actually decide to tackle that, we should make people and projects and organizations “inherit” (in the conceptual sense) from some sort of metaclass, then we can break apart things they have in common (their own url space, their own wikis, etc) and will make adding featurelets or whatever we want to all of the simpler and more unified.
As far as giving people featurelets, I agree that the point isn’t to allow them to “do their own thing” but instead to aggregate what they are doing in projects. If it is easy/convenient to allow them to add “wash my dog” to their personal task list or blog from their member space, I’m certainly not opposed to that. Its just not something we should bend over backwards to do, but I see no reason to limit it either (again, if its the easy solution).
On the other hand, what we have now is for blogs and tasktracker is largely unusable for my purposes because of this lack of shared information or personalization. I still blog by making a new wiki page and editting it. I consider it “an opencore blog” and generally talk about the software, but don’t really feel that I’m “blogging about the software”, which would feel to me like I’m talking in some official capacity. I would not be opposed to writing such a blog post, and I’m sure i will someday, but I like the (again, conceptual) freedom that a personal blog allows. Maybe we need multiple blogs per project, or personal blogs that can be tagged with projects, I don’t know. But most of my posts I would not feel comfortable calling parts of the “opencore blog” (as they are of the “today I ate some toast and wrote a few lines of opencore” variety). In my observation, most sites have one or more official blogs and then a semi-official blog per engineer that wants to write one. I consider mine to fall into the latter category.
Its a similar story, different characters for tasktracker. It doesn’t help that we don’t use tasktracker in any real capacity ourselves. But assuming we did, what I find most frustrating about it is not being able to go to my account page and see my tasks.
Comment by k0s on December 6, 2007 at 11:35 am