Re: [Ampu-dev] Already done, sort of

[Lee Braiden]

On Wed, 2002-02-27 at 23:47, address@hidden wrote:
> 
> Looks to me like e-thepeople.com is a portal tieing together a lot of sites
> with the current events and documentation needed for discussions.  It
> doesn't look like they keep all those documents, though, since there are
> probably copyright issues.

Yes, true.  If we're going for a pure web interface, then we can easily
make use of hyperlinks to other documents & general resources, so we'll
be able to do this, in addition to having actual documents stored within
the system.

> 
> It also loos like quorum.org has an engine behind it that is similar in
> style but more limited in scope to what we have in mind.  My first
> impression is that the engine is not open source and the current owners are
> interested in maintaining their brand

Yes, the reply I got on this was:

We do not currently have plans to make our code open-source, but
would be happy to entertain the idea of allowing you (or anyone else)
to use it.  As for content, I'm not sure what a "public license" is,
but our policy is that content is the property of the users
themselves, and they grant us a license to post it and in other
ways distribute it.  Hope that answers your questions.

> 
> This brings up another thought.  We may be interested in developing the
> application to make AMPU work, but it will probably be necessary to develop
> a site that uses the engine too in order to sell the notion to others.  (I
> don't mean sell for money by the way.)  A full AMPU site probably won't be
> small potatos.

We'll be building the site on test servers anyway, which isn't a big
step from a basic demo site.  I don't think we'd actually need to worry
about populating the database (by increasing the sites popularity, etc),
though.

Hopefully, the real demo would be an actual instance of the software,
being put to use somewhere, such as majorityvoice, or similar.  I
imagine we can find somewhere that would be willing to hit the ground
running, as long as they've seen a demo site as proof of concept and/or
stability.

I think the idea of merging different sites as sub-forums within a
master site could be quite powerful.  It would be great to have that
working in a demo =)

> 
> Unless these sites are open sourced or free, I suggest we be careful about
> doing too much research into how they work.  I think it will be important
> later to ensure we have a good, clean copyright to our work.
> 

Yes, that's a very good point.  They have a long list of places where
they stole their ideas from, so it shouldn't be such an issue in this
case. We'll certainly have to pay attention to such things, though.

-- 
Lee Braiden,
AMPU Team

"coding a better government"
http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/ampu/

ICQ: 24346459
AIM: FallibleDragon

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part