wrythings

Why don’t these things work together more easily?

If (for instance) I want to have a wiki and some other CMS on my site, let’s say drupal or wordpress… in terms of site/user experience what functionality might I want? True unified sign-on system with unified session control and maybe unified search on content over the entire site. This seems a reasonable if rigorous set of requirements, and if it were simple to use prominent open source applications together this way we’d see a greatly increased uptake: think social source. (Do check out Peiser’s paper. We’ll take the question of social source further another day.)

What other tools would you like to see able to play together well? If you dig down to the innards of what that means – what do you find? What elements of each application would need to be more modularized?

That’s part of the process I’m calling find the missing APIs.

It would require a different way of looking at your own project, and would ennable a new way of looking at how projects work or could work together, perhaps evolving a practice of strategic roadmapping where we identify and invest in the development of these missing APIs.

Arthur Brock of The Geek Gene, has proposed Sourcetree Commons as an object registry that might make this more likely. It’s still in the early conceptual stage but what is at stake is whether our tools reflect our values and make the work easier.