[PP-main] Roadmap and notes.

[Joakim Ziegler]

I finally got around to catching up on the list. Sorry about my absence, I
went to GUADEC, and I'm currently on my first vacation in more than a year,
back in my native Norway, so I've been a bit busy with other things.

Happily, I've had quite a bit of time to think. I met with Raph in Paris, and
although we didn't get as much time to discuss things as I would have liked,
we did get to hash out some issues, in particular we discussed Peer Press
licensing at great length.

Below is what I see as the roadmap for bringing Peer Press up to a usable
state, attempting to be reasonably pragmatic. Things are in the order I think
they should be performed, but there are obviously a lot of things that can be
parallelized here.

Making the XML DTD.
This is perhaps the most important task at the moment. First of all, we need
a spec of what we want it to describe, and probably also what we specifically
*don't* want it to describe. If the namespaces thing described in an earlier
post here is decided to be a good idea, we can do this as two DTDs, one for
the wrapping of *all* Peer Press items (containing metadata and such) and
another for encoding standard news items. Or we could integrate, so that the
payload of the outer format can either be another DTD, or an element which
defines a news item, which is defined by the same DTD as the metadata. The
first solution is perhaps cleanest. We need to put together a few people who
want to work on the DTD, I'm probably the natural choice as coordination guy
for that part.

Licensing.
We need to figure out the licensing scheme. Raph and I talked a bit about how
this could be done, one of the ideas that came up was to let the content be
freely distributable within member sites, and let the author define what
policy he/she wanted for distribution outside of the Peer Press network
(freely available, for money, or not at all being the options). Of course,
this begs the question of what defines a site as being part of the network,
will being a member require that you syndicate all your content, for
instance? Opinions on this are very much welcomed. We should have a license
working group as well, I know Raph should be on it, probably me, and whoever
else who wants to and has some relevant experience/viewpoints.

Software.
Maybe the least important at this point, but could nicely be done in
parallel, because it's going to take some time. The plan for software that
was posted elsewhere looks like a good start, let's discuss that, and see if
we can't set up a development team.

So, that's a *very* short list of what needs to be done. Please give
feedback, and let's get started.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - simplemente r&d director - joakim at simplemente.net
 FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
      http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.simplemente.net/