One of the things that's really lacking in the library community is something like a sourceforge.net to serve as a central repository for all opensource library projects and this certainly sounds like a step in the right direction (maybe there already is such a thing and I don't know about it). I'm sure many people out there have at least snippets of code or various libraries that they might not know where to publish or are already publishing but other people don't know where to find them.
It would also be useful to be able to create a well publicized 'wish list' of library applications. This would allow those in the community (with or without programming knowledge) to broadcast their needs and/or ideas for software solutions. I'm sure there are many very simple programs that people need that could be spun out in a weekend, but the people with the need and the people with the talent just aren't being connected to each other. An additional source forge-like feature which would be useful is the ability to keep track of everyone's talents. As a Java/Python guy I always wondered whether anyone out there was actually doing anything other than Perl and PHP (which seem to be pretty dominant in the library world). Wouldn't it be nice to be able to get a list of who out there in library land had some free time AND knew PL/SQL, or to simply find someone that was willing to learn RoR with you while developing an application, how about connecting MARC experts who can't program with application developers who don't understand MARC? Sorry if all of this seems over ambitious, but I do think this would be a good direction to head in. I strongly believe that there is a lot of untapped talent out there in our community and with the proper networks a lot of really amazing things could emerge. --Will At 12:25 PM 8/13/2007, you wrote:
In #code4lib today we discussed for a bit the possibility of setting up something on code4lib.org for code hosting. The project that spurred the discussion is Ed Summer's pymarc. The following is what I would like to see: * projects live at code.code4lib.org, so pymarc, for example, would be at code.code4lib.org/pymarc * svn for version control * trac interface for each * hosted at OSU with the rest of code4lib.org, for now Thoughts? Gabe