[@OKau] opensourced tech specs

Wed May 20 00:57:42 UTC 2015

Hi all, 
I'm thinking about how to go about my future projects. I intend to crowdsource requirements from the public. I anticipate that my projects (and feature requests) will become more complex and involve more datasets as people realise the potential of this. 
Given that I intend to source many requirements publicly through virtual and face to face events, and given the anticipated complexity of the projects I'm wondering if I should have an open technical specification along with open sourcing the code. 
I was wondering what people think about using git hub for this, perhaps the wiki? Are there better options? Ideally I'd like the growing community interested in any of the data/projects to be able to move easily between discussing things publicly and if they are so inclined, adding to the tech spec. 
I'm assuming I'd still have the option to add or reject changes if I need that. I haven't used git much for working with other people, at least not in a truly collaborative fashion (more like each person in their own corner doing their own thing & submitting updates). However I'm envisioning a very collaborative approach to my future projects so I need to think about how this affects documentation. I haven't used documentation with my other recent projects as it's just been me but things are getting pretty complex now so I think I'll need it. 
Examples of the kinds of projects are coming online at http://ausgov.org I put up the ACNC charities data yesterday at http://www.ausgov.org/commonwealth/charities/index.php and I'm linking in charity name & ABN's with QLD DCCSDS funding results & Commonwealth DSS grants funding results. There's also tenders data results that can be added. While I can't run queries across any two of these databases on my shared server as they take too long (can be done on my local server though) , I can link from one to the other using urls created through search results to define parameters. 
So you get this kind of result http://www.ausgov.org/commonwealth/charities/index.php?ABN=11062802797&submit=Go Then you can click through to see the result from the grants funding database- at least with the QLD DCCSDS data. (Commonwealth grants site is not linked in as of writing but the db is there to produce a result).
thanks in advance,
Rosie Williams BA (Sociology)________________________________________
 NoFibs.com.au - Open Data Reporter | InfoAus.net - Founder and Developer 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-au/attachments/20150520/aa85de14/attachment-0003.html>