As members of Sourcetree Commons, we pledge to:

• Keep this community and its platform open and stable.

• Build and refine tools that enhance collaboration and productivity.

• Recognize the skills and contributions of the open source community.

We stand for generosity, freedom and responsibility. Join with us or judge us by our code.

This is as it should be.

Following is the project description for Sourcetree Commons, as posted at the Net2 challenge 2007.

Sourcetree Commons: Geeking our way to a better world

To develop better social software, we must use these very tools in the communities that are building them. We leverage social software to amplify the creative power of geeks and provide increased resources, efficiency, feedback and support.

Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:

Our goal is to leverage social software to amplify the creative power of geeks.

Geeks are a force to be reckoned with. They are creating the tools to strengthen communities, share ideas and shape information flow in an information age. Yet we still struggle with old ways of competing, collaborating and decision making. If we are to develop better social software, we must incorporate the very principles of collaboration and collective intelligence into the communities that are building them.

We see a place where developers are supported in doing what they do best – an online community with tools to support development, leadership, project management, decision making and conflict resolution. This community fosters in a context of creativity and openness.

Open source software is a geek’s gift to the world and giving is the very heart of community. We are building the tools to let these geeks enjoy the full benefits of a gift economy where full and free participation is acknowledged in your reputation, performance and feedback metrics. Our challenge is to create such a powerful culture of sharing and mutual reward that developers experience abundant connection and support.

Ideas beget ideas. If you watch the creative process, you can trace the evolutionary trees of concepts. Software development follows the same principle.

What if we tracked genealogies of code across projects? Projects could remain part of a family of software even when they fork to meet new needs. Each family could share modules in common which comply with their backbone API. Projects departing from the core standards then start new families with new standards. This approach allows for maximum reuse of code and prevents the duplication of effort.

Expanding our conception of a sourcetree beyond the code for a single project to the whole evolutionary tree of projects which it is related to allows us to see software from a whole new level. Each tree can have shared object repositories, clearer standards and APIs and better interoperability. We can encourage projects to branch into new directions, yet not lose the value of people’s work in another branch.

All of this is built on an open platform, which can be hosted and managed in a distributed manner, yet still provide searchable metadata across all projects. But it is more than a place to share code and manage projects, the social software also transforms it into a community of partnership and support.

Sustainability (financial) model:

• A thriving gift economy: Infrastructure is open source and its ongoing development and maintenance is supported via TreeHouse events (Code-a-thons with free food and lodging)
  Corporate sponsorship for Code-a-thon food & lodging
• Citizenship revenue: Anyone can post projects and download for free, but citizenship (which carries a reputation and allows you to participate in various rewards) requires a one-time validation of your identity through a verfyable financial transaction (membership fee + optionsl donation)
• Alternative currencies for acknowledging impact and rewarding participation
• Corporate sponsorship for hosting branches of the codebase & infrastructure
• Add-on services: project management tools, time-tracking, project currencies, Freelance project connections – charge for posting jobs to the community

Resource Needs:
• Technical Infrastructure – Servers & bandwidth
• Geeks – Development of Sourcetree Commons infrastructure and tools
• Organizational Development – Marketing, Community Development
• Sponsorship of SourceTreeHouse events – Lodging, food, travel

Some Milestones accomplished:

• Strategic planning sessions at Recent Changes Camp 2007
• Design and development of distributed data architecture (Congo-DB)
• Design and development of reputation and feedback currency tools to acknowledge and reward participation
• Created partnership with Open Source Guild
• Strategic planning sessions
• Acquired corporate sponsorship for lodging at first TreeHouse Code-a-thon

Project Summary:

Projects as Living Entities…

What if we recognized that OSS projects exist to fill niches in our technological ecosystem? Sometimes software “mates” with other software to produce offspring which solves different problems than the projects they grew out of. Some species of software can viably mix with others because they share certain core (genetic) patterns such as running on the same operating system, or speaking to the same databases, or complying with certain APIs.

What if we tracked and managed software in service to the niches it fills instead of serving our egos? What if projects could fork to meet new needs, but still remain a part of a family of software with the ability to share modules in common which comply with their backbone API? Projects departing from the core standards start new families with new standards. We track genealogies of code – Sourcetrees which span across projects and contain their evolutionary roots and relationships with other projects.

All of this inside of a community with collaborative decision-making tools, reputation ratings and feedback which build partnership and acknowledge contribution. The social software tools to support self-governing projects in a self-governing community.

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.