[okfn-discuss] incubator.okfn.org

Tue Dec 29 19:27:54 UTC 2009

Just to follow up on Michael Fourman's talk, his list of requirements is 
mostly satisfied by KForge. (KForge doesn't have a skills registry). We 
should propose it to him. Are you in touch with them at all?

All the best,

John.

Jonathan Gray wrote:
> Just to follow this up, here is something a bit like what I would hope
> for in the longer term with OKF incubator, at the University of
> Edinburgh...
> 
> "IDEA lab is a virtual laboratory that will facilitate prototyping of
> novel applications of state-of-art informatic technologies. IDEA lab
> will enable and support multidisciplinary "proof-of-principle
> prototyping" (POPP) projects that develop and use informatic tools and
> techniques to: (i) collect and manage data, (ii) discover and
> visualise structures and relationships; (iii) model, simulate and
> analyse processes, (iv) facilitate collaboration and create
> communities." [1]
> 
> The idea is to build a developer community around the idea lab, and
> also there is a £300k fund to help catalyse development [2]. At the
> moment they are working on idea.ed.ac.uk in Drupal, but are also
> looking at Google Wave [3].
> 
> [1] http://idea-lab-edinburgh.blogspot.com/2009/09/what-is-idea-lab.html
> [2] http://idea-lab-edinburgh.blogspot.com/2009/09/cse-popp-fund-approved.html
> [3] http://idea-lab-edinburgh.blogspot.com/2009/10/project-development-and-proposal.html
> 
> On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Rufus and I were recently talking about the OKF's project 'incubator'
>> and I suggested turning this into a project in its own right.
>>
>> There are so many interested ideas kicking around - that I think it
>> would be useful to have a project dedicated to documenting and
>> refining these! This could be anything from entirely new open
>> knowledge/data/content projects (like 'Where Does My Money Go?'), to
>> tools to 'scratch an itch' (e.g. scripts to convert MoinMoin syntax to
>> Markdown, scraping texts from Project Gutenberg and stripping out
>> header/footer to make them public domain,...).
>>
>> The incubator project could let people propose, vote and comment on
>> ideas. Mike Chelen recently suggested we could use IdeaTorrent (GPL)
>> for this:
>>
>>  http://www.ideatorrent.org/
>>
>> What do people think? Would anyone be interested in having a go at
>> setting up and tweaking an instance at incubator.okfn.org?
>>
>> --
>> Jonathan Gray
>>
>> Community Coordinator
>> The Open Knowledge Foundation
>> http://www.okfn.org
>>
> 
> 
> 