Ideas and Thoughts About the Next Generation Clearinghouse and Infrastructure Services

Please use this page to list out any ideas you may have regarding the next generation Clearinghouse services that JA-SIG should offer for software development.

Suggestions

Core Suggestion

Description

Sandbox instances of JA-SIG offerings

A picture paints a thousand words. We currently have a number of JA-SIG offerings available. If evaluators of these tools could log into a running instance of a specific offering and kick the tires it would be a great way for them to get the real feel of that particular offering. For example, what if there were available instances of the 2.x version of uPortal with the most commonly sought after features enabled like one for DLM and one for ALM, with and without new Web 2.0 features as they become available, showcase channels, a 3.0 instance, etc. It seems that such instances could be put in place quite simply and in such a way that if they become corrupted they can readily be purged and reloaded. Even better, that could happen nightly so that if someone used such instances in a nefarious manner it would be cleaned up automatically by the next day. Such instances could potentially be used to also exhibit collaborative work where changes checked in would be seen in the running sandbox environment the next day.

Investigate

http://dev.libresource.org/

as a potential tool.

LibreSource is an open source (QPL) software platform dedicated to the software development and management of distributed communities.

Thoughts

From Brad Johnson

Hello,

I'm glad to see the confluence content migrated to the wiki. The Clearinghouse predated our use of a wiki and served its purpose well. The Clearinghouse didn't really encourage collaboration and didn't allow for the flexibility of the wiki. Information was managed by the content creator, only had summary type information and tended to get out of date.

Many contributions never were really collaborated on. We get much more from collaboration via source control (Subversion) than via code dumps. I think the wiki will help with this as the content on the wiki is already in a "shared ownership" context, and it will be easier for others to help with the transition to source control.

Also, another barrier to collaboration was that some projects were not released or labeled as released under an acceptable license (CRuntimeInfo for example). We need to make it clear that we prefer shared code when possible to be released under a particular set of licenses (Apache, Ja-Sig, for example.) even if it is as a code dump.

thanks,
Brad Johnson