Open Source: how to contribute

The philosophy behind this inventory is to speed up the learning curve of choosing the Open Source modules you might need to build a project and to try to avoid duplicate efforts. As such, only projects with some results should be part of this inventory. The current status, contact details, objectives, technologies used, mailing list, archives, projects in which it is re-used, ... are among the useful data to be collected.

To accomplish its goals, this page should

• be well-structured and indexed for different points of views. An underlying XML structure and Trove-like mapping would be a first TODO. A perl transmogrifier would come handy to generate the HTML content off-line.
• be updated by the project co-ordinators for the projects or by volunteers for the local projects, news, ... in the different countries. A SourceForge project was started at http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=2595 but still lacks all information. At short term, this should be the repository.
• be Open Source in all aspects: generation by Open Source tools and Open Source content (e.g. no GIF - use gif2png if you really want to add images, no links to Amazon).
• be readable by a majority of web browsers (predominance of text with simple formatting). Use of advanced techniques only if it doesn't hurt or if a lighter HTML version can be automatically generated.
• be also up-to-date. Links participated to the global entropy by quickly becoming stale. A script to nightly check validity of all links (for example, by adding attributes to the anchor such as last_time_accessed, last_modified) could be useful to list stale links or, on the contrary, very active links (in a section 'new' with the possibility of choosing since when...).
• be attributable. It should be possible to track all contributions (currently, contributions are inside comments before the contribution iteself. A XML tagging would again alleviate this work).
• be complete (to the extent such a document can be): a lot of links has still to be added.
• be open-minded. I look forward to reviews of software, papers, books that make the foundation.

Be welcome to contribute.