Project Update

The plan at this point is focused on getting Cobudget properly user-tested and minimally integrated with Loomio groups by using the Circle app to stick them together. There are lots of requests for some combination of Cobudget and Loomio. We want to go where the demand pull is, then bootstrap the ecocsystem from there.

This sounds great to me. I am one of those people who really wants to use Cobudget, ideally together with Loomio, and I want it done yesterday! :P

What's the use case you want for cobudget @josefdaviescoates ?

Pretty much exactly what you use it for at Enspiral @joshuavial - well, that and a lot more...

e.g. would love to try and my local 'Big Local' group (who have £1M to decide how to spend together over the next 10 years - see http://www.localtrust.org.uk/big-local/ ) to use it. :)

Also have some crazy plans to get elected as Mayor of London in 2016 and make as much of the nearly £15B budget as possible a Participatory Budget :P

(ps waffle.io looks great! :) hadn't seen that before but had previously looked for something similar :) - well, actually I was looking for something that would put a kanban trello-like front-end on asana, but much of a muchness :) )

Hey, any news/ update on when cobudget will be released to the world? Rory Ridley-Duff (who has just started using Loomio for the FairShares Association) asked me after the participants on his Co-operative and Social Enterprise Summer School (see https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/co-operative-and-social-enterprise-summer-school-2014-tickets-10018029195 ) expressed a keen interest :)

@simontegg @joshuavial @alanna

(PS shame you can't tag people when editing comments)

@derekrazo

I tried to access that waffle page. Did all of the signup for waffle, etc, then it gives me a pretty 404 that says "Oops, someone ate all of the waffles on this page."

(We're interested because we are tiptoeing into cobudget territory. Will at least have use cases. Maybe more...)

Hello, this sounds like a great project and I'm keen to see how it develops.

I wanted to mention the Poplus network (http://poplus.org/) and the Popolo Specification (http://popoloproject.com/) which have done a lot of work around developing well-defined components and the interfaces used. There may be some components that could be directly used here. Or it may just be a good reference.

Popolo looks great, thanks @paulmackay1! :)

Hi @josefdaviescoates! I'm coordinating cobudget right now. It's great to hear you're excited about the project! We're going to be doing a big push in september around the time of the participatory budgeting conference in sf (Sept 25-27). Please feel free to contact me at derekrazo@gmail.com - Would be really keen to connect and talk more about all the exciting things in this thread :). Unfortunately I don't have your email!

@bobhaugen I'm super interested in hearing about your ideas and approach to collaborative budgeting with the NRP project and OVN infrastructure tools. Just sent you an email, maybe we could catchup soon.

@derekrazo - ideas and approach would be too big a claim for me. Tibi of Sensorica has some ideas, and Steve Bosserman is involved in projects in Tanzania and Ohio that have some ideas. Not sure which of those ideas will come first in wanting to be implemented - probably neither of them very quickly - but we'd love to catch up.

Pinging @lynnfoster ... couldn't seem to do it from the edit box.

Hey @derekrazo thanks for the mention/ contact I'll email you shortly :)

I just changed the name and description of this group to 'OpenApp' rather than 'App ecosystem'

@simontegg the name change makes sense but re the new description:

"A group to plan the development of a suite of software tools to support innovative organisations with Linked Data".

I think LOTS of people (i.e. the users as opposed to developers) will be much less inspired by this new description that by “a suite of of integrated and open sourced apps which support transparent, democratic and decentralised organising.”

This also relates directly to what I just wrote here.

Can we add the "suite of of integrated and open sourced apps which support transparent, democratic and decentralised organising” bit back too? I argue it should come first too - the why is more important than the how.

In the "Raise funds" discussion I agreed with @simontegg , but on this one, I agree with @josefdaviescoates .

I'm more interested in what the software is intended to do or support in the real world, while Linked Data is just a technique that some people find interesting this season, and did not even seem to be central to the development plans in the rough document in progress.

+1 for reverting to the old description and keep the new name

I also liked the "Open App Ecosystem" version of the name. We want to live in an ecosystem. We don't do products.

I'm thinking that the "OpenApp organisation" nurtures the "OpenApp Ecosystem". Perhaps the ecosystem has more user-facing comms material, while the "OpenApp" org does technical consulting associated with ecosystem. Like wordpress.com and the wordpress ecosystem.

Update:
@ahdinosaur @derekrazo and I had a hangout yesterday with @lynnfoster and @bobhaugen (@nanz1 also listened in). We found there's an overlap between our projects. An initial step could be to use common ontologies (vocabularies) and perhaps collaborate on our own to fill in the missing gaps.

We also met with Joshua Deans a dev with Chalkle. He's interested in making a task allocation app for the enspiral co-working space (as a personal project). He's keen to have it in the ecosystem. The main selling point was the shared group data between the Enspiral Space loomio group (and possibly its cobudget group). We also talked about using common, standard vocabularies and the advantages that brings for 'deep interoperability' and pivoting an app. We'll stay in touch and talk more in a couple of weeks.

Hey everyone,

We've updating the documentation on our github repo. First up is the roadmap. Please check it out and tell me if anything is unclear.

@simontegg The roadmap is super helpful, answered most of my questions. Especially the pictures, thanks!

One remaining set of questions has to do with how to pick the standards for the linked data. The org:Organization model for example is oriented towards the firm and old economic forms in general. We will need something oriented to networks of peers. We can probably get it to work, but it might be unnecessarily painful. On the other hand, it doesn't seem right to make new "standards" unless absolutely necessary.

I haven't done enough research to know how the various linked data standards are shaking out at this point.

Do others have thoughts on this question?

@lynnfoster:

it would be great if we could document the specific use cases we need to support so that when we are seeking vocabularies we can directly check whether or not they will work for us and why.

i've yet to be convinced that the org:Organization model is not sufficient, as to me it seems like a great way to represent agents (holons), but maybe i'm missing out on some important use cases.

@ahdinosaur - thanks.

I will document some use cases in the next couple days, and we can discuss.