Clusterify: the blog

• It will be kept non-profit (ie. use eventual excess of what is reasonable pay for team members’ time for expansion of the site/concept, holding real-life meetings etc.);
• It will be kept open source;
• It will be kept oriented towards small projects, ie. a few hours. That’s central to the concept: meeting people without investing too much time.

In the last few weeks I made some changes to my career plan that meant I would have less time to administer Clusterify. By some coincidental luck, Sean Auriti, aka user psytek, wrote to me saying he wanted to help with the site. He’ll be helping all right (!): in the end we agreed  that I transfer the responsibility of Clusterify to him. I’ll be helping here and there this spring and summer, but he’ll be running the site. Clusterify.com will be changing servers accordingly. The transition will happen in the next week or so.

Also, as part of the transition, we’ll be open sourcing the code behind Clusterify. It’s meant as a signal that Clusterify is a non-profit initiative, and that we encourage local communities to adopt the concept, whether they do it through the central site or through a local install of the open sourced software.

My goal with Clusterify, ever since I first proposed the idea on Reddit/Hacker News, has been to make available a short-project-based model of social networking for coders. I hope those changes will help in that direction, even though I’ll be personally less involved.

I’ve finally created a proper homepage for Clusterify. My hope is to make the site concepts and collaboration model clear up front, and to give clear reasons why working on Clusterify projects might be useful (aside from pure fun).

I’ve also added a ShareThis widget to each page of the site, so they’re easy to add to social bookmarking services, blogs and other social media. That way you can publicize projects you like and/or Clusterify itself. Thanks in advance to those who’ll do that, by the way!

I’ve been busy for the last two weeks with, hrm, career/studies plan changes. And Aneesh has detached himself from the project, for the most part*. So feature addition on Clusterify suffered.

Yet I still want to incorporate a few functionalities, so I’m back at it again. I’ve added a first shot at OpenID support. I’m using django-openid, but the trunk version only supports OpenID 1.x. Whatmore, the way I implemented it, you can only attach one OpenID URL to an account, and you can either have a OpenID-based account or a regular one. Yet now, at least, new users will be able to register without a new login/password to remember.

* (Aneesh is working a fulltime job and I’m a university student with what can be approximated to a transitory semester off, so of course I had a little more time on my hands Yet I’m glad he helped me while he could/would.)

Trying to think of ways to better structure projects, I coded the Roles feature: they’re a short description of what you intend to do in the project. After the project is completed, they’re also a way to specify how you participated in it.

Your Role is a piece of text you can now specify when you join a project, and which you can update afterwards. Upon joining, it can be a simple proposal: “I propose to do the client side”, for example. Then through communication (comments, messages, etc.) you confirm/evolve the role and perform it.

I’ve also added a template for project description, based on the information we propose to put in there. It’s just a suggestion, of course, so feel free to alter the structure.

A few days ago someone apparently registered a Twitter account for us: he set the email to our own, so we could take over the account. Well, thanks go to whoever did that! So now, powered by Aneesh, we have Twitter presence
In other news, you can now set projects as “won’t be completed”, which is the nearest thing to deleting a project for now: it removes the project from the proposed/completed lists.

As Seeds were suffering from a general lack of popularity, and could indeed be confusing with regards to “proposed” projects, I’ve replaced them with “adminless” projects. The New project/Edit project forms now have a “I’m not participating” option which, when checked, marks the project as “Needing an admin”. Any member can then come and administer the project. Until someone does ask for this, you’ll still be able to edit the project and act as a temporary admin on it.

It does not offer the ability to post anonymously for the moment, but it might support it eventually.

We’re slowing working our way to integrate the (very!) numerous comments and feedback we’ve received (thanks to all who participate, by the way!).

One thing that came back a few times was a change to the design: here’s what I hope to be an improvement. The background is lighter, among other things.

Another request concerned the ability to propose ideas more simply. Up to now we didn’t have any way to post ideas anonymously, or without an “author” who ended up being part of the project. Now you can post ideas you don’t personally want/have time to work on, through the feature called Seeds. Go and take a look at the corresponding option in the menu. As the page says, “Seeds are ideas anyone can use to start a project”. So go ahead a suggest a few, or vote on the ones already there.

We’ll clearly be working on more features, so stay tuned. And tell us what you think of the changes!