A hastily prepared presentation for BarCampNYC3 related to a collaboration platform proposal.

1. DearIdea.net
A proposal for a community collaboration platform
using user-driven and machine-driven optimizations.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 1
more information available at http://wwward.typepad.com or www.dearidea.net or by e-
mailing me at wwward@pobox.com. This presentation was written in haste the night before
delivery, so some ideas are very likely to be unclear or completely missing. The contents of
this file are creative commons licensed (2008, william ward) in whatever default license mode
that represents.

2. Project Goals
An open source, freely licensed platform
Optimized collaboration by identifying
shared needs or shared resources
bet ween projects with different or
similar goals
Project interaction via e-mail, web or
API
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 2
This is intended to be a platform that is contributed to the community, not a for-profit
software product. The mission of the platform is to provide an optimized data analysis tool
for identifying overlap in shared goals or requirements. The platform will, of course, provide
multiple methods of interacting - including e-mail, a traditional web interface, and a
published API preferably following some accepted specification or another.

3. Theory of Operation
Ideas submitted to community, tagged
Natural Language Processing applies
additional tags
Contributors seek shared needs based
on weighted scoring of user and
machine tags.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 3
The basic flow: An idea or community project is submitted to the platform associated with
user-specified tags (a folksonomy, in the current lingo.) The body text description is then
sent out to a natural language processing engine, which returns an XML tagged list.
Placenames, for example, are tagged as such - as are proper nouns and other concepts in
context. Finally, the two “layers” of tags are used with independent weighting to provide
computable data for determining similarities (statistically presented - we’re still working in a
probability space as far as arbitrary computer linguistics goes for this project.) Contributors
can then identify similar opportunities to attach to by using the platform to analyze a
“playing field” of projects and grouping them based on similar needs. A project may have
many needs, for example - or one may only choose to examine projects with similar goals, or
simply analyze the overlap in tags for a coarse similarity approach.

4. Moving Parts So Far
Repository: Semantic Wiki
Language Processing: ClearForest SWS
UI: Semantic Forms (Yaron Koren)
Data Visualization: SIMILE Project
(MIT)
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 4
The list of potential components is presented on this slide. While not exhaustive, I think
these off the shelf resources (or in the case of SIMILE, tools available from this project,)
represent viable applications to combine as the platform. I would prefer to use as many
solutions provided by the academic community as possible, where substantial research was
involved in development.

5. Challenges
Inexperience and time
Fundamental feasibility, efficacy
Gaming the system for project exposure
Maintaining interest
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 5
Every project has challenges. Most have time constraints involving the requirement to pay
rent, to take consistent paying jobs, and to keep one’s special other suitably happy. This is
no different. There may be some naive assumptions about the feasibility of the underlying
concept, or the efficacy of this approach versus a simpler - plebeian tagging scheme without
the joy of machine dreaming. Gaming the system is a consistent problem in any online
service where visibility may yield more donations or contributors. Finally, our online
communities have a real problem with short attention spans. Maintaining interest is an art
form.

6. Solutions
A good vetting at BarCampNYC for
feasibility
Meta-moderation to combat abusive
gaming
Integrating existing tools to minimize
required programming
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 6
Putting DearIdea.net up for a thorough discussion at BarCampNYC would provide a good
weeding of pie in the sky concepts. Gaming the system could be combat through meta-
moderation, a scheme that works well for Slashdot. Finally, using tools developed by
specialists would assist in bringing working code to the project, rather than struggling to
implement specific theory with generalist knowledge.

7. Current state
domain exists without content
a simple email submission/tracking
script is provided by Andy Fundinger
totally idle due to competing demands :(
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 7
At the time of writing, the domain dearidea.net exists, but has no content. A simple email
script exists at new@dearidea.net which accepts an idea into a database and assigns it a
serial number (not a GUID, really, just a simple incrementing integer). The project is idle at
this time as most of the participants are actually involved in real startup companies.

8. What I want...
advice and criticism
pointers and shortcuts
... that’s about it - Thanks!
keep up at www.dearidea.net or
wwward.typepad.com
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 8
The point of this presentation was to get advice and criticism of the idea, pointers, and
shortcuts to better ways to accomplish these goals. The idea of dearidea.net is free for
anyone to implement, but we would like to see it do more than languish. More information
will be posted at the URLs above, as things develop. Thanks! - William Ward (March 16, 2008
- BarCampNYC3)