One small step for Xlinkers.....
With the conference over I have had some time to think about the future of Xlinkers and where I want it to go next. As a community we have reached a good starting place with over 300 members, forum discussions and sharing of code. I believe that there is huge potential for this community to grow into one of the largest and most interesting new communities around. The reason for this is that XMOS enables the open source hardware revolution.
The open source community in the software world (think Linux) is a vastly popular and growing world where thousands of people contribute their time and effort in collaboration to create products (in this case software) for other people to use for free. This is incredibly powerful: demonstrated by me sitting here writing this Blog using an open source and free operating system. Now imagine taking this powerful world of open source software and apply it to XMOS technology. The result is open source hardware.
My vision is that anyone should be able to come to Xlinkers and find modules of open source code that they can bring together and use to create a hardware design that is flexible and extendible. XMOS technology enables this in a big way. It opens up the world of hardware design to a much larger audience than ever before allowing software developers familiar with the open source ethos to contribute to the hardware world.
While we do have contributed code on Xlinkers already it has not been aimed at open source design and this is where I believe we need to focus our efforts as a community. For this I believe we need to start projects for different areas that make up the building blocks of a design. This may mean finding interested people from within or outside the community to join us. For this to be successful I believe that there is work on our side to improve the projects and code systems on Xlinkers and would like to know what people think needs to change or be added to make collaborating on code easier.
I welcome and encourage comments and feedback from everyone on Xlinkers as this is your community more than mine! Over the next few weeks I will be planning what to do next and I will take all community feedback into account.
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Time to take xlinkers to the next level
I got some ideas :)
3 just off the top of my head.
1. Having a part of the site which is like innocentive. Where people post specific real-world problems they have and the reward for finding them a solution, and the community can either individually or band togather to create and submit a solution for the reward.
2. Create something like Cambrian House, where people submit an rank ideas, people can comment on and improve ideas and if they're good, participate to turn that idea to reality for part of the profit that idea -> business would make.
3. With the latest developments in micro-blogging, lifestreaming, it should be possible to create a live collaborative development environment. Not coding, just idea sharing and planning.
Just rough ideas, which will hopefully spark other ideas and crystalize into something more clear and exciting.
Q&A chunk?
Might be nice to have something stackoverflow-like for Q&A. We should also think about what we want to do ourselves and what we want to use other existing sites for -- we could use the real http://stackoverflow.com to have XC questions and answers on to get the word out about XC some more :)
(I guess this is more of a discussion about whether we distribute things around other complementary sites or centralise them all here)
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I think they have the reward for finding them a solution, and the community can either individually or band togather to create and submit a solution for the reward
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