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.

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.

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…