[MG] Decorating the bite feed - coding plan

[conseo]

Hi Alex,

> On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 9:57 PM, Michael Allan <mike at zelea.com> wrote:
> > Alex Rollin wrote:
> >> I would simply add that a goodly portion of this type of work has
> >> already been done by other projects.  There's even an API for Drupal
> >> Feeds that can accept a JSON parser.
> > 
> > I misunderstood you!  I thought you were saying that crossforum
> > theatre is unoriginal.  Others have produced it already, "So why
> > re-invent the wheel?"
> > 
> > Instead you're saying it could have been produced in Drupal/PHP, "So
> > why produce it in GWT/Java?"
> 
> Yes, and today  learned a lot about GWT based on his cues and I can
> understand why you want to do it this way.
> 
> In all, i was really just offering caution before going wild and crazy
> with so many bells and whistles.  In no way was it meant to be a
> critique of you or Conseo or your work; just a caution and a pointer
> to massive work already done on feed processing that might be helpful.

Pointing it out is really helpful! I haven't taken it personal and it is 
really important to build a consensus on the best way in my opinion. If the 
reasoning is unclear, please ask! I also really don't want to identify with 
Votorola/my implementation since this can get in the way of a proper approach.
Even if Drupal does not satisfy the perspective of Crossforum in the first 
place it is really important to get the best overview and build a common 
ground on how we approach Crossforum best and where we might have a look then. 
We might also want to document that on the Wiki?

> 
> This is all very self-serving, for me, and I'm aware of how and why;
> you see, I am interested in returning to the Votorola app, at some
> point sooner rather than later, to begin more work on
> updating/creating-anew an interface that "does communicative
> assent/action" and I realize that while I may not be able to help with
> GWT coding of such a thing, if it did serve the purpose I would offer
> to build some wild bells and whistles feed processing app, if that
> would help us meet the prototype case you have, so we could also, as a
> now larger group, look again at votorola and how y/our novel approach
> will become whatever is next.

Good to hear that you think our approach is legitimate. In fact I think your 
ideas about plugging in Drupal is worth investigating. If we can reuse their 
visualization or even only define an interface for Drupal to pull data from 
Bite-services and poll-servers this would be very valuable, so if you really 
want to help us a bit you could write the necessary parsing for Drupal's feeds 
to understand our JSON. It shouldn't be a lot of work and can be done over 
time, I guess, but will be very valuable in demonstrating a rich 
represantation of the data like they do in your proposal: 
http://afghanistanelectiondata.org/election/2009/data/
Is the software behind this site completely open? 
It would also prove that we really implement "cross"-forum in a very nice 
example.

Conseo



Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org