Open Space Movement collaboration | General | Forum

Hello.  I am the founder of the Open Space Movement, and I would like to hold a discussion between the members of CSTART, Mach 30, and OpenLuna about collaboration with the OSM.  Originally I was looking at holding an IRC meeting, but it may be problematic to find a time when everybody is available – so this thread will serve that purpose instead. 

As per my conversations with rpulkrabek, I understand that there has been some work on developing an "Open Development Environment", and the OSM may be suitable to fill those needs.  

Despite the default page on http://www.openspacemovement.org, we have a site that's nearing completion.  The developers are in the process of squashing a few moderately annoying bugs – but we should be ready to deploy the site in a mostly-usable state soon after these issues are resolved.  

The OSM is more than just a development platform though.  While the development environment can stand alone as it's own project, we also plan to use it as a means of raising public interest in space access, and providing an incentive for people to learn more about space science / engineering.  Also, while the OSM is it's own organization, it doesnt necessarily mean that we're competing with Mach 30, OpenLuna, or CSTART.  We hope to offer a service that everyone can use, and an organizational structure to help keep us all moving in the same direction. 

Before I go any further, does anyone have any questions for me?

I'm currently rewriting a description for a kickstarter project in the most succint manner possible.  However to make a long story short, the OSM is based on the principle that people are the absolute crux of any plans to support large-scale space development in a reasonable timeframe.  As such, the OSM focuses on ways for people to participate, while offering essentially the same services to existing space organziations, with the aim of creating a unified effort behind a public space program. 

If you consider that we've spent more on cell phones in the last year, than the Apollo program spent in a decade, it stands to reason that a sufficiently large public effort could throw together more brainpower and financial resources than any single government agency or private company could hope to achieve. 

(another example would be the sales of Subway's "5 dollar footlong" sandwiches grossed approximately 3.8 billion dollars in 2009.  This is equivalent to launching the space shuttle three times)

Projects developed by the OSM are user-submitted and community funded.  Prioritization of project funding is left to community voting, depending on how well the project author can argue the merits of their idea, and the level of detail and sophistication displayed.  This whole project development activity bears several other important side effects, such as providing an incentive for people to learn more about engineering, ease of use to encourage wider participation, and a source of income for freelance developers and vendors.  IE, a given project funding request may be something as simple as 100$ for a few hours of autocad work.  The freelance vendor community would likely establish competitive market prices for their work – and this lower cost for incremental development makes it easy for the OSM to fund many requests on a regular basis.  Maintaining a high volume of funded requests makes it easier for the OSM to demonstrate the tangible results of community funding – which in turn is a much greater incentive for donations than simply asking for support.

In other words, project development, and community control over funding disbursements, are both key incentives for encouraging donations, and further participation. 

Another benefit.  Even if we get a deluge of dumb ideas – it still helps to teach people about space engineering. 

1. What is the license for the portal software itself?
2. Who is developing it?
3. Can you share a copy of the specifications/requirements used to guide the development?  (For comparison, see ODE's requirements in the CSTART wiki – http://cstart.org/wiki/ODE)
4. What language, framework, and/or core software package is the portal built in/on?
5. Can you share some screenshots of the development version?
6. Is there a roadmap for future releases?  If so, can you share that?
7. Do you have a date you are aiming for to release the first version and/or a public or private beta?

1. Open source, or equivalent. 
2. Pixelsweatshop.com, per my design specifications.
3. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PnTgOT5d_QOLsy-z5EA_3Y2SoCPlMXi21-qsKRweOP4/edit?hl=en
4. The site is being developed in drupal 6.
5. Several pictures available here:  http://twitpic.com/photos/Shalrath
6. This is impossible, given the complexity and growth model of the project.  However, the OSM community will be able to submit requests for changes in order to support features needed by certain types of users, modify or change the UI, or suggest and implement any other modification that improves the site without detracting from it's core functionality.  There will be working groups – and one of these groups will likely contain web developers.  This gives the OSM a pool of talent necessary to produce changes in-house.  Else, the community could decide to pay a third party developer.  Everybody who uses the site is encouraged to suggest changes – and this implies any changes you would like to see to help support the ODE specification. 
7. "next week", or as soon as the developers knock out the bug list, whichever comes last.  Hopefully we should have the rest of the semi-major annoying issues worked out by this week, and everything else on the list is pretty easy in comparison.  So as soon as we can.  

Bear in mind that some of the pictures I posted are a little inconsistent with how they should look.  The devs have a few changes to make after they figure out this permissions bug. 

This is just scratching the surface – I can post a more in-depth explanation if you're want. 

If you're interested, we're about to launch a kickstarter project.  The project description draft can be seen here: 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TmHnF4Abw9rbva4n1xSRQ45sdYjGvAJXuiINFh3MptY/edit?hl=en&authkey=CPjb4ewF

(not totally complete yet, but pretty close.)

Your thoughts?

Hopefully Luke will be back soon (he went on a month long vacation around the world) I'm sure he will get in contact with you when he gets back.

quick announcement – we have our wiki software setup, if anyone here wants to try it out.

wiki.openspacemovement.org

And look!  We has graphs!

http://wiki.openspacemovement……nt-1048582

If someone wants to play around, we can create a CSTART group on there, and name someone from here as an administrator for that space.