Week 3: Ideastrike

17 January, 2012

This week's idea

Two weeks down, and the momentum is strong - we've got a packed room over at Jabbr, we've been featured on the Github blog, and we've got two projects that are going strong.

So now we're on to week three, and another idea from our community - Ideastrike! (code to go up soon ;))

Our aim this week is to create a great site to give ideas and feedback, focusing on software development and good integration with other tooling.

There are many feedback and voting mechanism for ideas, but we think we can provide an open-source alternative, that is feature rich, simple, but powerful, and will be a great asset for the small guys trying to get started on projects.

Here's an initial mockup from @aeoth about how this might look.

We've got a Trello board set up which we'll use to track the backlog of features and who's currently working on what feature - if you want access to the repository to help out, drop into the JabbR chatroom and get in touch.

What platform are we looking at?

Well, we've had a lot of feedback this week about this being a ".NET only" group - we don't intend it to be that way, but as it was said on The West Wing - "Decisions are made by those who show up".

We're looking for the primary group to start working with an ASP.NET framework - Nancy as it's what some of us are familiar with, and what we think others with .NET experience will get up to speed on quicky. We also benefit from two exceptional guys who have been, and we hope will be, stopping by to offer support and advice.

That being said, if some of the other communities out there - be it Java, Ruby, Python, Node.JS, Haskell, Erlang or Perl want to get involved - stop by, help us make decisions, and gather a group and code.

We're happy to have help, we're happy to help.

One idea we've had is if we collaboratively work on a set of specifications, so we can jointly create something that works cross-platform, for different scenarios and different communities - but a shared reference.

We're happy to discuss it, to offer support, publicity where we can, but what we need is - if you're serious about contributing and you want to make this more than just about .NET, we need you to show up.

So what now?

We'll be getting some code set up on the github in the next 24 hours, and discussing approaches and drawing up a battle plan in the chatroom - if you've got ideas you want, come in and discuss them with us (ping @aeoth, @shifty and @tobin in the room please), or leave a message on this blog post.

Get into the chatroom at JabbR and join in on the fun!

-- Code52 team