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Want to help fix the roof?

Last July, at OSCON in Portland, Oregon, I put a whiteboard in the main conference hallway (with help from the indefatigable Vee McMillen), and wrote

Call For Software: Tools We Wish We Had

across the top, dividing the rest of the board into a grid of blank cells. Our hope was to get an ad hoc brainstorm on what tools open source developers feel the world is missing — anything at all, not necessarily just development tools.

By the end of the conference, the board looked like this:

OSCON CFS whiteboard, at the end of the conference.

(One reason I waited so long to post this image was that I’d wanted to transcribe the board first, but of course never found the free hour or two… Then I got sane and realized that if it were posted, either I could transcribe it or anyone else could. Duh. At Eric Hanchrow’s suggestion, I set up a wiki, where the transcription process is now finished. Thanks to everyone who helped!)

If you’re considering starting an open source project, there are a lot of good ideas on that board; have a look. Even if none of them quite fits the bill, one might push your thinking in a new direction.

Of course, earlier in the conference, the board wasn’t quite as… shall we say… constructive:

OSCON CFS whiteboard, at the beginning of the conference.

Addendum:

What finally motivated me to make this post was receiving the following mail from Greg Wilson, reprinted here with his permission:

From: Greg Wilson
Subject: student projects
To: Karl Fogel
Date: Sun, 4 Nov 2007 13:52:12 -0500 (EST)

I'm running a combined grad/undergrad course on software
consulting next term (Jan-May'08), and need to find projects
for 25 to 35 bright, hard-working programmers, each of whom
will spend about 120 hours on it. I want students to work in
pairs or triples (so that they have someone local to bounce
ideas off); I also want the projects to be open source (so
that students can talk about/show off their work) and to have
real customers (people outside the CS department); it's a
bonus if those customers are in Toronto for face-to-face
meetings, but not essential.  If you have something, please
let me know.

Thanks,
Greg

So: anyone need some eager student programmers for an open source project?

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3 Responses to “Want to help fix the roof?”

  1. The Third Bit » Blog Archive » Projects Projects Projects Says:
    November 4th, 2007 at 5:23 pm

    [...] next term to make it happen, please let me know.  (If you were all in one place, I’d just put up a whiteboard, but you’re not.)  You’ll have to be  willing to put together 4-6 Ignite-style [...]

  2. Eric Hanchrow Says:
    November 4th, 2007 at 5:57 pm

    Karl — you should create some sort of wiki — a table with as many cells as the whiteboard — and link to it, so that we can fill in a square or two as we decipher the handwriting.

  3. Karl Fogel Says:
    November 4th, 2007 at 7:23 pm

    Eric — good idea! Done:

    http://www.red-bean.com/scriki/index.php/CFS

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