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Echelon For GNOME

Contents

  1. Echelon For GNOME
    1. Background
    2. Data Streams
    3. Social Networks?
    4. Implementation
    5. Comments

Wouldn't it be great if you had everything about GNOME at your fingertips? Does having to filter through mailing list messages give you the blues? Are there people you really dislike on Planet GNOME? Do wish that you could find other like minded GNOME singles in your area? Are you looking for a piece of software that can establish world peace by eliminating privacy and bringing about a new era of love? Well look no further than Echelon for GNOME!

Background

Most GNOME hackers are overly busy -- there simply isn't enough time in the day to get done what one needs done. While it might be possible to keep up with all the mailing lists and all the CVS commits for a short period, the surgeon general recommends against doing so for very long periods of time. There are websites that do a decent job of minimizing the amount of information to filter through, such as Planet GNOME and CIA are good examples of this. This still requires going to lots of different web pages with different interfaces to figure out what's going on. Wouldn't it be great if it was all in one place?

Echelon For GNOME seeks to provide a consistent overview page for GNOME developers, users, and those who are casually interested in the project. Using this one system, we hope to capture all of the information that GNOME developers find useful and aggregate it together. Then, developers will be able to use a digg-like system to rate each item. See a cool blog posting on Planet GNOME? VERB it! Great mailing list thread you think other people should look at? VERB it! Did someone just commit an amazing patch to CVS? VERB it! (Where VERB is something like "Digg", but I'd imagine there are trademark issues there).

Data Streams

Think of GNOME news as the Yahoo! and Ecehelon for GNOME as the Google.

Social Networks?

We all should know that GNOME is people. The central element of this will be people. The system will be designed to let you know what people you care about are doing and how they're doing it. It also should be possible to discover new people through the system -- through a sort of referral system. To keep things simple,we'll have only one level of VERBing someone. Either you VERB them, unVERB them, or neither. UnVERBing someone is the equivalent of selecting to dump something in Digg.

By looking at who you have VERBed in the past, and the things that they have VERBed, we can get ideas of things that might be interesting to both them and you. In this way, we're not relying on just you to figure out entirely what is cool and what is lame. In nerdcore terms, this is called social network analysis -- and is not to be confused with the social networking websites that all the MySpace kiddies really like.

Implementation

PatrickWagstrom has something somewhat similar to this already implemented, at least the overall aggregation of data from lots of people and across multiple data feeds. The final system will be some sort of web service type thing with a web page and all the goodness that the kids today have hoped for.

Comments

2024-10-23 11:06