Making a Django Uber-Community¶

My workload at work is about to get a lot less critical and time consuming, so I was looking for a project to start on. I am really interested in the social aspects of the web, and below I will outline an idea that I think will be my next project.

At Djangocon there was talk by Adrian and Jacob in their Future of Django talk about having a common identity for a person across all Django sites. I think that this would be a really interesting thing to work on, and make all of our Django sites much more approachable. So in this post I’m going to lay out what I think this would look like, how it would likely be done, and then hopefully get some other people that are interested in it to help me brainstorm. There is a ticket open about it currently.

Information Aggregation¶ So first off, we need to figure out what this is going to look like. I imagine there being a central site that would organize all of our Django related activity. The best option at the moment is Django People, because it already has a lot of that data. I talked to Simon at Djangocon about his plans for Django People v2, and it sounds like this is the direction he was wanting to go. So Django People could serve as a personal aggregator for people. I view Django People as kind of the “Profile Page” of a person in the realm of Django. The main page could also function as a kind of “Life stream” of the project, so people could see what is going on Right now. I think a killer feature would be to have people be able to join into groups, based on projects, and have a life stream for that project. This would give people an idea of how active a project is, how many people use and develop it, and other interesting information that weighs into whether we decide to use a project. Simon in his scary brilliant way already has most of this information on the site. We just need to build a way to pull information that we care about in, and display it well. Then we need some kind of large aggregator of content from all of the people in Django. I think that This week in Django is the place to do that. The Django Community Aggregator on the official Django site is lacking. I think this functionality could be pushed off to TWID. I think that this aggregation site would replace the aggregation of blog posts. It would hopefully support tagging, syndicated comments, language preferences, and other thing. I have talked to the TWID guys about doing this, and they said it sounded like a great idea. I view these 2 sites as the foundation for what I hope to build. Then the question is, what other sites do we include in this ‘django information stream’? I’m going to list the ones that I think have relevant information, and I would love to have suggestions for other sites that would provide a service.