community content and project hosting

as most people know we are working on putting together an open source development site for nasa ames. these tools would support active open source development, as opposed to just release, by providing technical tools as well as a collection of written resources and documentation about the institutional, legal, and technical challenges, existing precedence, best practices, and general community support and interaction.

for a long time i’ve thought that we should create one comprehensive open source space community site, with the written resources and community interaction as the overarching element of a site that also hosts numerous individual projects and the respective tools to support this (wikis, issue tracking, subversion, etc.).

i’m having second thoughts about this combining these two. The intention of this effort is really to be an enabler for nasa projects and programs to better understand their options, the rules and regulations surrounding those options, how to navigate them, how to find support and encouragement, and basically to do what they want to do more easily and, hopefully, more effectively.

I dont see why we should try to constrain or purport to even try to offer “the” perfect workflow. once people are enabled with the knowledge, i believe the CosmosCode site can offer suggestions and links to a variety of options, one of which could be an offer to host these projects. there is still, after all, the unmet need of a project hosting site whose contributor agreement doesn’t require the user to indemnify the hosting entity against potential liability incurred as a result of their software. i’m happy to be one of the places that does meet this requirement, but dont see why others couldnt also do it, perhaps offering different toolsets more appropriate for different projects.

the second reason i think we may not want to try and host encourage all space-related software projects to be hosted on one site is because i dont think you can draw a clear envelope around “the space community” or “space related software” in the same way you can draw one around say, a community of people developing plugins for firefox. space-related is a much more open and fluid concept. while flight software or mission operations software has a clear “space” theme, something else like biology software designed to analyze results from biology experiments on the ISS is also “space related” but doesnt have a clear common interest with the mission ops software. we should be running around wildly creating community where it simply doesnt exist.

i’d be happy to hear comments of feedback from people on this. but for now, this is the direction i am going to be moving in. my main focus is on the enabling information, and ensuring project hosting is available which meets the needs of government, but not necessarily aim to be the primary provider of said hosting.