Open Hippel - Thursday Drupal "Hook" Nights

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cloneofsnake's picture
Start: 
2010-05-13 19:30 - 21:30 Asia/Tokyo
Organizers: 
Event type: 
User group meeting

Hi everyone,

Starting Apr. 7th, 2010, I'll be hosting a weekly event tentatively called "Wednesday Drupal Hack Nights" (WDHN) (Just changed it to "Wednesday Drupal 'Hook' Night :P ). (Update 2: Moving it to Thursdays due to key members availability... so now it's TDHN) The goal is to bring people together and do "hands-on" work together building the "Open Hippel" user innovation platform.

Open Hippel - CUUSOO.com and Open User Innovation

"Open Hippel" is named after MIT professor Eric Von Hippel (Eric's MIT homepage, Wikipedia entry), who is the leading figure in open innovation studies and coined the term "User Innovation". Kohei Nishiyama (Co-creation at MUJI and LEGO, Fast Company Top 100 Most Creative People in Business, "Participatory innovation" (LIft Asia09 Speech)) is the visionary who created the Design-To-Order process and started CUUSOO.com. CUUSOO.com is the only company in the world that has the complete - "Users Co-create Products -> Rights Management -> Licensing -> Royalties Sharing" system, however, CUUSOO.com itself was started in 1998 and as you can see, its website is behind the current times. In order to keep up with the ever changing web, CUUSOO.com needs a better, sustainable web strategy.

My role in this is to choose the right path for the future of CUUSOO.com. So why do I choose Drupal and open up development to create Open Hippel? Well, first of all, it makes simple sense to leverage the framework that Drupal provides, so we don't have to worry about the basic things like user managements and security. By using Drupal, you gain the experience of many iterations of real usage by large & small websites... so the product is more tested, more secure, and its design more insightful and future-proof than what a few developers can build in a closed environment.

Secondly, we at CUUSOO.com are trying to do something good for the world. What we have developed over the years is a set of Intellectual Properties Rules, similar to what Creative Commons is doing for copyrights... but CC can only cover pictures and texts, it cannot protect an idea. Ideas need Patents, and the CUUSOO IP Rules can provide that. For example, TED ideas are great!... but they can be copied without the original owner's consent. Now if TED ideas are submitted on the Open Hippel platform, the CUUSOO IP Rules will be able to protect it, so it can be shared and developed, while the original owner can be credited for it. This is why we want to make Open Hippel as freely available as possible, so that even small villages in remote, developing countries can share their ideas, and these people can basically start micro-businesses from their ideas, therefore improving their lives.

So, what I'm trying to do now is to attract people who are passionate about what we're trying to do... and do it together. I'm calling it "Passionsourcing". I'm connecting with people who have similar visions of changing people's behavior and making the world a better place ~ starting from Japan! So far, TEDxTokyo and K. International School are joining us every week to create this platform, as they'll need a platform for budding innovators / school students to join together and work on great new ideas! Others participants include the Denmark JOIN (Danish government user innovation project), UNESCO Japan, NetSquared Japan, Architecture for Humanity, Startup Weekend Tokyo, KEIO University and Tokyo Hackerspace.

Open Hippel Platform - Technical Details

First, I would like to emphasize that the spirit of TDHN will be OPEN and GENEROUS. It doesn't matter if you're a Drupal guru or you don't even know what Drupal is. As long as you're interested in "Open Innovation", and have some ideas about how you would like to use an online platform to share ideas and form communities to work together, you will be able to contribute to the creation of Open Hippel!!

Technically, I think the base platform should have 2 main features: (See the comments below to see the evolution of features as we moved along with the help of UX Designer David Siren Eisner.)

  1. Groups - obviously, for people to self organizer and gather like minded folks. Within a group, members can submit pictures to a central group pool (a picture is worth a thousand words), and your run of the mill "Discussions, Polls and Events"
  2. A basic, user customizable theme - a clean canvas with basic adjustable settings, so that users who are not technical can still customize it to look good for his own organization.
  • Other additional features can be added as "Features" using the feature module or in other ways, so they can be separately installed if the users choose to. (Also the added benefit of separately versioned on Github.)

My hope is that once we have a basic platform like this, and it's proven to be useful by CUUSOO.com, TEDxTokyo, and may be other big names like MIT, LEGO, MUJI... etc, it gains more creditability and more companies will be willing to use it... so all of us in the Drupal community can pick up businesses customizing and deploying it to these companies... and therefore also benefit the whole community and Drupal itself!

(Also, I truly believe in using Open Participatory, Open Innovation to make paradigm shifts in how people work and how people consume! Thus making the world a better place! So, I hope by opening "Open Hippel", some of you can share my vision... and if I get run over by a truck tomorrow and die, you guys can continue and change the world!) (I'll try not to get run over though :)

Meeting Location and Info

The first meeting will take place at Cuusoo.com's office - http://www.elephant-design.com/corp/en_access.html / GMap - http://bit.ly/by7amX

Future meetings can take place in turns in our / your place! The first option is Tokyo Hackerspace, we may be going there one Wednesday every month to tap into their talents! Let's aim to turn this into a stable, long-term meetup that can benefit a lot of the Open Source and "Open Minded" communities.

Cross posting note:

Cross posted to HKDUG, I'll start a video chat room on http://www.tokbox.com/ so up to 20 people can participate remotely - Join us 6:30pm HKT at http://www.tokbox.com/cloneofsnake/Open-Hippel-Weekly

Looking forward to seeing y'all,

Nicholas Wang aka @cloneofsnake

Comments

Will do my best to attend...

Antoine Lafontaine's picture

Will do my best to attend... just one station away (depends on workload on that day though).

Looking forward to participate.

I've registered to the event

Antoine Lafontaine's picture

I've registered to the event but we'll be two going. I hope this doesn't pose any problem.

Thank you

Please remove your invitation...

Balkon's picture

...from the Hong Kong group, as this event is in Tokyo. Every comment made generates 'spam' to all the members of all the groups you posted this event into.

People interested in Tokyo events would have subscribed to Tokyo.

Hi Balkon, I'm cross posting

cloneofsnake's picture

Hi Balkon,

I'm cross posting to the HK group because I plan to do this via web conference.

In fact, if some of you wanna organize physical meetups at SOHOlife, we can do have 2 groups remotely linked.

Again, ANYONE is welcomed to join.

Cheers

beginners

Honson's picture

hi is there any meetup for beginners in Hong Kong ?

Honson

Hi Antoine, not a problem,

cloneofsnake's picture

Hi Antoine, not a problem, the more the merrier.

Honson, I used to start meetups in HK to get beginners together to learn... and I found that Drupal has some of the nicest folks and everybody is happy to join and teach share their own experiences. So, if you want to learn badly, I suggest: 1) Just dive in and try to do what u want to do, and then 2) organize meetups and share with others what you've done, and what you have troubles with...

Of course, you're welcome to join in every Wed. night online too :)

Cheers

Online and Face-to-face

caphun's picture

Well guys, I should be attending this meeting so if anyone is interested you could join me at my office. So it will become a half-online-half-physical meet-up. :)

We could probably fit about 8 people.

Sounds like fun at Gang of

cloneofsnake's picture

Sounds like fun at Gang of Coders office :)

Tokbox link is up: http://www.tokbox.com/cloneofsnake/Open-Hippel-Weekly

See y'all later tonight.

Tokbox is live:

Sounds interesting!

xbro's picture

Sounds interesting!

But I'm not sure if I have a full understanding of all the concepts noted on this page (WDHN, Groups, Theme, Cuusoo.com, Open Hippel). So this is about developing a customizable Drupal theme on Hacknights every Wednesday? Sound like a whole lot more, and I'd like to understand it.

Please keep us posted. Meeting every Wednesday night?

Best regards,

Scott

p.s. I second your idea on Hacknights, I was thinking of a TDUG (Tokyo Drupal User Group) module Hacknight and proposing project #1 a module that taps into custom databases and displays the query results in customizable display formats (if at all possible). Just waiting for the weather to warm up a bit as this groups meetings are semi-outddoors cafe settings, but if WDHN is happening I wouldn't mind just joining you guys. I'm all for innovation!

Hey Fuji! Yeah man, you

cloneofsnake's picture

Hey Fuji!

Yeah man, you should join us! We made some great progress last night... it's great to gather people from all walks of life... with different interests and different expertise... and we bounced ideas off each other.

Anyways, we'll be moving the meetings to Thursdays 'coz most people are busy on Weds. So come next week if u can.

As for what u want to do w/ custom databases, that can be done with: Table Wizard, Schema and Views. (And if u want to import into Drupal, just add Migrate to the mix.)

Or data, feeds,

Antoine Lafontaine's picture

Or data, feeds, views.

table_wizard + migrate is more oriented for, well, migrations (of legacy data).

Thusday, thats today. :) I

ussher's picture

Thusday, thats today. :) I didnt miss it.

Also keen to jump in and learn some hooks stuff.

That would be next

Antoine Lafontaine's picture

That would be next Thursday... this week was Wednesday... so from the 22nd it will be on Thursdays.

Gonna miss it again.

ussher's picture

Im going out of town on Thursday now. Ill try to join in next week. Sorry.

May

xbro's picture

Looks like I'll be joining in starting May.

宜しく!

Scott

Yesterday's meeting went

cloneofsnake's picture

Yesterday's meeting went pretty well, even though it's always very unstructured and unorganized, I feel that any time people gather to try to do work together, or teach each others stuff... the atmosphere is always good!

So as planned, I thought I could demonstrate how easy it is to install Zend Server and start working w/ Drupal. Little do I know ZS on Snow Leopard is shit!! Major mysql connection problem!! So everyone got to watch me troubleshoot that shit. In the end I could only show how to install and use Drush and Drupal, how to create virtual hosts & how to symlink your sites folder to your user folder for easy access & easy creation of new dev sites. (Forgot one additional benefit is to avoid complications of different multi site folders when deployed to live server.)

...and I finally fixed the mysql socket problem after I got home and did some reading. Documented everything at docs.hkdug.info... Sorry, I really should post all those info on a shared drupal site.

David told me he couldn't stop thinking about Open Hippel after the meeting last night!! He said he has some thoughts in terms of process, and he wants to see if we would like to talk about UXD process next week. Once again, I think it's awesome when people get together to bounce ideas off each others and teach each other stuff. I'm sure many of you are also interested! So see u guys next week!

This week's meeting

cloneofsnake's picture

This week's meeting (Thursday, May 13th), David will give us some UX Design exercises to do. So far we've sharing what kind of features we need, and David has been tremendously helpful on asking us how these features tie to our high level goals. Keeping us in check and helping us to come to a common vision of our goal ... what the Open Hippel platform should do. Making sure we don't end up making something our intended audience don't want!

So, I'm sure many of you are interested in this UXD exercise!! In case we'll need more space, which I'll need to arrange in our office, please fill out this form if u're coming: Signup form in Google Spreadsheet.

...
...and back on topic of TEDxTokyo's subgroups requirements, we had spoken in depth about the can's and cannot's of the current Organic Groups modules. Antoine had pointed us to 2 modules with potential to replace OG: nodeaccess_nodereference and nodeaccess_userreference, but here's one thing I'm concerned about - usage statistics, it's in the ten's... which means very little people are using this module. This means the potential support and evolution of this module is, unfortunately, much lower. A popular, highly used module will give you a better guaranty that it will continue to have good support by the community, even if the author decides to quit. Now... here's the meat... we all know the current 6.x version of OG doesn't address the needs of TEDxTokyo, namely creating subgroups. Well yesterday, OG's author wrote about the progress of the Groups module for Drupal 7 - http://www.gizra.com/content/group-intro - we should definitely participate in this project!

--

In related news... a friend of Kohei and mine, Harper, who was the CTO of Threadless.com, now board member on rackspace, helping them with their cloud infrastructure, chatted with me last week and I told him about our Open Hippel project. He agreed it's cool - http://twitter.com/harper/status/13467669690

So, come and hang out with the cool kids ;P

Cheers

That's great news!

caphun's picture

I'm really happy for you Nick. Only problem I see right now is all the activity seems to be pointing to the Hong Kong group but the meetups and attendees are actually in Tokyo. Are you planning to move Cuusoo and the OH project to HK? ;P

No Geographic Limitation

cloneofsnake's picture

Ideally, that is. But realistically, at least in the beginning, the live meetings in Tokyo are the main events...

I think once we've got the basic workflow laid down and a simple guide to get everyone started working... like:

  1. Features listed at http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/73836
  2. Code sharing - not like what I'm doing now - http://github.com/cloneofsnake/opencuusoo , but more like how Development Seed is exporting each feature as code and version them on GitHub.
  3. Guide to setup your own development environment
  4. Guide on getting started with the development workflow - pulling / branching codes from GitHub if building on existing features, exporting own work into codes, pushing back up to GitHub to share.

I think once we have this basic workflow created, then anyone anywhere on Earth can easily participate! I think another great thing will be to share & talk about each other's work every week at the meeting. This way everyone can learn from everyone and get good at it real quick.

So, it doesn't matter where you are located, if you're passionate about this project, then by all means, step it up and take the leader position! Like I said, if I get hit by a bus, I'd like some of you to carry on to make this world better. :)

UNESCO Japan

cloneofsnake's picture

Looks like a guy from UNESCO Japan will also be joining us this Thursday!

I like UNESCO's constitution:

...Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.
...That a peace based exclusively upon the political and economic arrangements of governments would not be a peace which could secure the unanimous, lasting and sincere support of the peoples of the world, and that the peace must therefore be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind.

Open Hippel has become more meaningful!

time and location? confirmation

xbro's picture

Is this weeks meeting at the Elephant design office this Thursday? What time are you guys starting to gather?

Look forward to attending.
Best regards,

Scott

Yup, 7:30 as usual. See u

cloneofsnake's picture

Yup, 7:30 as usual.

See u guys then.

NetSquared Japan

cloneofsnake's picture

NetSquared Japan (Ichikawa-san):
- http://twitter.com/net2tokyo
- http://www.netsquared.jp/

and Architecture for Humanity (Cameron Sinclair):
- http://architectureforhumanity.org/
- http://www.cameronsinclair.com/

...may also be joining Open Hippel... but they are urgently in need to showing something on the 22nd of May... I haven't gotten the full info yet, but they may end up being the first to launch w/ Open Hippel! (Albeit a barebone, basic usage version.)

We're gathering steam people!! If you're interested in helping to make the world a better place!!! Come and join us! (We need all the Drupal experts we can get!)

cloneofsnake's picture

Last night's meeting was once again extremely fruitful! Our resident UX veteran David led us in rounds of UXD exercises, asking some tough questions that really helped us "think outside the box" (or more specifically, helped us think outside of the constraints of who we thought our users are and what they needed to do in the system.)

I can't go deep into the process that we went through last night (I don't remember the details), but I can tell you the end results and the importance of reaching those results!

David summarized the features listed on http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/73836 so far, and helped us take a step back and think about who are the users, what are they doing... and forced us to think about why do the users need to use Open Hippel? Why can't they just use some other products or social networks that are already out there...

Through this process, we came to realize one important feature that was missing. As the nature of Open Hippel is to allow users to form groups to work around an idea / project, there needs to be a mechanism for making decisions as a group. There are many different ways of making decisions, and David gave us some examples like Tipping Point Voting and Vote Decision Making. We came up with an innovative method that will give the group clear visuals of what people chooses... and give them choices of the different decisions methods. ('coz we know each group is different the way it's governed.)

One enlightenment leads to another... we continued to come up with good use cases that makes the Open Hippel platform more useful for its users. ("More useful for its users"! It sounds simple, but this is KEY!!! We discovered new roles - different types of users, and we described their usage, and how what the system to provide... this process helped lower the risk of us creating a system that does things that are completely useless to the users!!! Very important!!!!!)

The development of these features have become harder, but we think as we continue to make something meaningful and useful and OPEN... more and more developers who share the same interests will join us. And then as soon as the first live site is launched, we'll start interacting directly with real users' feedbacks. Using lean startup and agile methodologies, we can continuously improve Open Hippel to really become the de facto tool to use for group based innovation / idea development.

--

A short side note in regards to openness and CUUSOO's relation w/ Open Hippel. Another reason why I'm doing this is because I couldn't get CUUSOO internally to move their current system to Drupal... which from a business point of view makes sense... there's a l lot of risk involved in moving from a working system to an unknown, new system. This is why I have to do it from the outside! It's kinda funny that even though CUUSOO.com is the "user innovation" company, I still need to become living proof of Prof. Karim Lahkani's (who's on our advisory board) research - "Innovations and critical knowledge comes from the edges or outside an organization". With Open Hippel, I'm trying to change CUUSOO from the outside. So I will do whatever it takes to keep Open Hippel open and alive. (We're also thinking about naming a 3rd party to become CEO of the Open Hippel project, so everyone can feel more safe that CUUSOO will not hijack it.) (At a certain point, open projects also take on a life of its own, so nobody will be able to dictate over it anyway.)

Cheers! Be sure to tune in to TEDxTokyo tomorrow!

-Nick

Hippel_Discussions

cloneofsnake's picture

Alright... I'm kinda excited about this! -> http://github.com/cloneofsnake/open_hippel

Last time we talked about tools to allow users to make decisions... and part of the solution is similar to StackOverflow.com

So, I googled some sources (http://engineeredweb.com/blog/09/11/building-stack-overflow-clone-drupal...) and made the following.

A "Discussion" content type, this is supposed to be a new discussion topic inside a Group.

A "Reply" content type, users can reply to the discussion topic with their answers.

Both Discussion and Reply can be voted Up and Down.

(Comments are turned off on Discussion. On Replies, comments are kept on so people can follow up the conversation in that direction.)

A custom module is made to redirect users back to the main discussion view whenever they make a reply or a comment. (The instructions on Views creation are a little bit flawed, so if u follow that completely it won't work.)

Finally, I used the Features module to export the whole thing as a module. If you download these 2 modules from Github (http://github.com/cloneofsnake/open_hippel), put it in your Drupal's module folder, go to admin/build/modules and turn it on, it'll give you exactly the features I described above.

So, check it out, see if it works for you.

Tomorrow, we can go through how I did this if people would like to know. Also, we haven't finished the UX Design exercises last time, last session was quite fruitful, so I think people would like to continue doing it :)

Status Update 2010/06/03

cloneofsnake's picture

Last week Ben (http://twitter.com/bencrox) from Hong Kong and Kohei Nishiyama joined us and we talked more on the IP protection schema that needs to be implement behind Open Hippel, so that anyone using it can be sure they won't be sued for IP infringement from their ideas. We delved deeper into the user workflow of how a user currently uses Cuusoo.com to submit ideas and connect with others.

The important news this week is that David has been trying to make Open Hippel into an officially recognized project at Keio University. A few grad students are already very interested, if this come true, it means we'll gain more momentum by having Keio University students in different majors spending 80% of their time on the Open Hippel project!

This is part of the interesting thing about open source projects. Once you started it, it takes on a life of its own and may grow to become something completely different from what was originally conceived.

David won't be able to join us tonight though. Kenji from UNESCO will be here but he has to leave at 8. We'll have a new member who's interested in the technology side (Drupal) who'll join us. The momentum is still a little slow, but things are really coming together... it's going to start picking up speed and move very fast once it does!

-Nick

Big Steps : Getting Academia involved.

xbro's picture

I wish the best of luck to David in making Open Hippel an officially recognized Keio University project. Even if not official, getting college and grad students involved, is a very big step for Drupal in Japan. How about reaching out to more schools (a suggestion which I'm not thrilled to follow through on immediately but someone else might be?) The more the merrier.

Best regards,

Scott

Yeah... and not just in

cloneofsnake's picture

Yeah... and not just in Japan.

Actually, both Kohei and Kenji from UNESCO are connected to MIT, Tokyo University and others in the same program, who are interested in using CUUSOO's platform for their students. These will be our beta users as soon as we launch. I'm hoping to connect with more Drupal developers at these schools who can help us on development.

Speaking of development, since I wrote about my Hippel_Discussion feature export... there are still a lot of problems we're facing in terms of working together, code sharing, testing, deploying, packing everything up into an installation profile...

... a few days ago, Lullabot write an entry that is very relevant to us: http://www.lullabot.com/articles/site-development-workflow-keep-it-code

I highly recommend reading the whole thing!

Besides what was mentioned in the article, also check out:

http://drupal.org/project/deploy

Learn Git:
http://osteele.com/archives/2008/05/my-git-workflow
http://learn.github.com/

Hi everyone, Tonight, the

cloneofsnake's picture

Hi everyone,

Tonight, the team from MangaHelpers.com will be joining us to talk about their experience in grooming a million users community. What impressed me the most is they've built a loyal fan base (me included), but they're not selling us out! They r working hard to create new distribution channels that are very open and "sharing economy" based, called OpenManga. This makes it much harder for them to make deals w/ the publishers, but I think it's the right way to go. In the long run, this model will prosper!!

What does OM have to do with OH? How about fitting OM's use case on OH?! We can discuss about OM being a commercial user of OH, how well it fits, what are the advantages / disadvantages, how they can give back to the OH eco-system... etc.

In terms of regular OH news, thanks to David, this week, OH has become an officially recognized project at Keio Media Design. Also, I am connecting with a person inside Acquia.com - the commercial arm of Drupal - who is in talks with P2PU to create open, online courses for Drupal. Think "Keio and P2PU, learning Drupal by building OH"!! With the support of Acquia, it's gonna be AWESOME!! Probably starting next week, we'll be moving back into more tech / development mode to quickly build prototype and start iterating through all the different use cases of OH!

Todd from TEDx and Henry Oh from HK Startup Association, both are extremely active in the Startup space in Asia, should also be joining us too. (Not 100% confirmed yet.) Kohei will also be here.

Looking forward to seeing y'all tonight!

Cheers,
@cloneofsnake

Tonight, the team from

Garrett Albright's picture

Tonight, the team from MangaHelpers.com will be joining us to talk about their experience in grooming a million users community. What impressed me the most is they've built a loyal fan base (me included), but they're not selling us out!

Ugh. They've built a community by illegally providing, and profiting from, copyrighted material. They're pirates of the lowest order - the profit-driven kind. Scum. The OpenManga plan is delusion - there's no way any self-respecting publisher is going to work with them on that. Why would you take these people seriously? Meanwhile, the comics/manga industry continues to shrivel up and die thanks to these "helpers" and similar "fan" sites.

Rant.

comics/manga industry

xbro's picture

well, another way to look at it though I too concur somewhat with regards to your views of OM, is that the reason why that industry shrivels up is because the sheer lack of interest in business globalization in general of the Japanese business community as a whole. And frankly the old timers and low budget anime with connections are hogging the media with their old hits and boring stuff, thus starving new talents of their prime time to shine.

If you ask the publishers of manga, their main business model is still mostly geared solely around the Japan markets, and anything extra is probably just a plus. I know the comics are starting to show up internationally, but unfortunately the Japanese executives in those industries who are only one example of ignorant global strategy among the best in Japan, are ignorant. Otherwise they would invest in localizing and seriously marketing the material on an International scale, instead of hoping that others do the work.

So in essence OM will function as part of a bigger swift kick in the behind, which maybe the J executives may or may not wake up to, to take baby real globalization steps (real capitalization hasn't started), which is unfortunate. Anyways, the publishers have been sleeping at the wheels for more than two decades and continue to do so. I'm not sure how many swift kicks will actually wake them up, maybe never.

Anyways, the J manga world has the depth to survive dumb J executives, IMO. And YouTube to me almost seems like a bigger problem if you get into the details, maybe? Industries these days must figure out a business model to work beyond pirate activity which likely will become a criteria to business survival around the world, so all in all these things aren't bad they're just part of the efforts to transition.

I think OM should work with manga that the publishers aren't involved, and work directly with manga writers.

All you say may be true, but

Garrett Albright's picture

All you say may be true, but I don't see how it excuses what MangaHelpers (and OneManga, MangaFox, etc) is doing.

By "shrivel up," I was sort of more referring to the industry here in the US, where we've seen publisher after publisher suffer staff cutbacks if not die completely. The best anthology magazine on the market, Yen Plus, is going to publish its last issue this month; the US edition of Shonen Jump will be the only one left, and it's pretty mediocre. You can attribute this to the sagging economy, the scaling back of an oversaturated market, and the fact that the Japanese pop culture fad of the late '90s/early '00s has died off, and all of these things are true. But at some point, you also need to take notice that a significant chunk of readers who would have bought these comics in the past are now stealing them instead, and sites like MangaHelpers are making it very, very easy. Searching for popular titles like Naruto or Bleach in search engines often returns links to these sorts of sites right alongside or above legitimate, or even official, sites.

All that said, I agree with you that it would be good if the Japanese publishers worked together more with foreign distributors, but seeing as how the entire international market for Japanese comics is still a fraction of the domestic market, there's not much incentive for them to do so. But with regards to Open Manga, why would any publisher want to work with MangaHelpers, people who were previously stealing their product and making a profit by giving it away for free? That makes no sense.

God, I'm a nerd.

Dinosaurs and Extremists

cloneofsnake's picture

Hi Garrett,

I share your passion in wanting to help the mangaka & manga industry... and I think u're right that scanlations & online viewing has probably taken a big chunk of revenue out of US based manga publishers... but the key point is that their old distribution channel is pretty much dead!!

The MH guys r actually really cool guys! They r fighting the publishers in JP to allow manga to be distributed easily & without any DMCA! And then give users an easy way to pay! So, if u're a kid who really can't afford to pay, u can still read!! LEGALLY!!! And if you have the means, you can pay.

We also met up w/ folks from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are in the know about a "Sharing Economy" biz models being built around creative commons. Good things are happening that will take us out of the old and into the new. Dinosaurs will die, but new life will bloom in their place!

Check out these 2 great videos about Internet, Copyright and Sharing:

Lawrence Lessig: Internet is Freedom: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe2UsBXr-ls

Cory Doctorow http://craphound.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu62bZX5VUU

We probably shouldn't hi-jack this thread for talk about manga... if we want to continue, let's move to MangaHelper's forum :P http://mangahelpers.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=18

-Nick

This week we're supposed to

cloneofsnake's picture

This week we're supposed to start putting on our developer hats again... there're 4 things on my list:

  1. development roadmap
  2. server environment setup
  3. wireframes
  4. OpenHippel.com - eat our own dog food

We will begin planning out the development roadmap a bit with Shaun. Probably go through the user stories on http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/73836 together, add things to it as it is a bit outdated already, then pick out the architecturally important, high risks ones that may cause problems if we don't plan ahead or at least take into account first.

Next thing is the code repository - http://github.com/cloneofsnake/open_hippel and live server http://openhippel.com access. Lukens has helped us setup GitHub push to live server. We can share that bit of info during the meeting. Ideally, PivotalTracker - GItHub - OpenHippel.com should all be connected as one for C.I. (Continuous Implementation).

Wireframes - we're ready to draw up some simple wireframes. Lukens had just started putting something together on http://gomockingbird.com/ as a 1st draft, we can work on them during the meeting as well.

Finally, after we go through the above, we should aim to set up the basics (OG with media sharing, discussions and email notifications), move our discussion emails and any documentations on there, so we have a live site to support, forcing us to develop Open Hippel while it's being used!

So, I guess be prepared with your laptops and everything for this one. We're finally gonna be diving in and actually doing some hands on work! Shaun, are you available Thursday night? Or would you like to move it to another night? Please let us know.

Cheers,
- Nick

Cool project. Have you taken

Soren Jones's picture

Cool project.

Have you taken a look at IdeaTorrent? It also has a Drupal project page. It seems that it hasn't been worked on in about a year (the author has been busy with some newspaper modules). It sounds like you're already on your way with a clear vision and IdeaTorrent is a different beast from OH, but looking at the IdeaTorrent solutions and workflow (idea sandbox, ideas in development, implemented ideas -- see the Ubuntu brainstorm page) might be helpful as you work out the details of the OH platform.

Anyway.... You discussed decision-making tools above. One of your challenges will be differentiating good "patents" from bad patents. If you've thought about it, I would be interested in hearing how you're thinking of implementing that decision-making process in the OH platform.

Cheers,
Soren

Notes

Soren Jones's picture

Sam Boyer submitted a proposal to the Knight Foundation hoping for sponsorship for a Drupal decision-making API & consensus module. The proposal wasn't accepted, but the proposal overview and discussion in the Knight Drupal Initiative Group might interest you.

SAP is beta testing a collaborative decision-making service called SAP StreamWork. There's a (very) quick look at it in this YouTube video.

Again -- different than OH, but there are probably some similarities.

Cheers,
Soren

Hey Soren, Those r some

cloneofsnake's picture

Hey Soren,

Those r some quality information! Thanks!! I'll read through them later!

As for patents... that's a long topic to cover here. Basically, Cuusoo.com has built something they're using, and I'm thinking about improving it by modeling a bit more after Creative Commons (more flexible).

Cheers. Re: patents, no

Soren Jones's picture

Cheers. Re: patents, no worries. Maybe another time. Needless to say, whatever the decisions or problems, an open framework that could be used for efficiently making and reflecting on decisions or solving problems would be a very good thing for all kinds of people. And it's cool to see that a Drupal project like this is taking shape here in Japan.

P2PU School of Webcraft

cloneofsnake's picture

Just submitted my proposal with Open Hippel as the topic:

--
Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are creating the P2PU School of Webcraft, the ultimate environment in which to learn the craft of open and standards-based web development.

This coming September we'll be launching our first cycle of six week courses including Introduction to HTML5 and Building Social with the Open Web. We still have space for a few more courses, so whether you can teach a class for novice web developers, or run a workshop for web developers managing thousands of user accounts, we'd love to have you involved.

Following on the delivery model developed by P2PU, course organizers volunteer to take existing open learning materials or develop their own content and lead a group of peers through 6 weeks of online classes. Courses focus on project based learning in a peer environment and are proposed, created and led by members of the web development community.

We'd love for you to become a part of this project and until July 18 we're inviting course proposals for P2PU School of Webcraft. We've made it really easy to get started, just fill out the proposal form, it takes less than 5 minutes!

Course Description:

Please, tell us what your course is about *

Open Hippel is an open source project I started back in April, 2010. It's basically a Social Web App that allows anyone to form groups around their interests. It'll have tools to help people make decisions as a group, set criteria and milestones, and also have personal profile and history so people with skills can be connected with people needed those skills.

So far, TEDxTokyo Innovators Hub and K. International School are two of our biggest supporters, and Keio University had made it an official school project, which means students can be credited for working on it!

My plan is to open the development of this Open Hippel platform up as a course. We'll have hands on development classes, (we need some Drupal gurus from Acquia to help out on this!) The course work will be documented and with the help of Keio students, translated into Japanese. By the end of the course, the whole "book" will be available online under CC license.

In learning, it is far better to have a project that is real and has impact on the real world! Just like Stanford's project on Extreme Affordability products, students are far more engaged when they're working on real world projects. I think Open Hippel can similarly be that engaging project at P2PU.

--

I'm very excited about this course! I think it makes perfect sense, we get the help we need from Drupal experts, all the students try to build Open Hippel together, in the end we'll have a real product, and the documentations can probably accept donations to support the Open Hippel foundation in the future!

Hope everything will piece together nicely!

Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Definition & Summit

Soren Jones's picture

If you follow BoingBoing, you have already seen the article by Cory Doctorow about the release of the Open Source Hardware Definition and the first Open Hardware Summit in NYC, Sept 23. I'd think OSHW designers would be another target audience for OH.

Cheers,
Soren

Sept. Update

cloneofsnake's picture

Away for the whole August due to family obligations, it has been a while since I've last updated this thread, but I'm happy to report that things continue to progress smoothly, carried on by enthusiastic members, even when I was away for a month!

Here're the updates:

Dave had created a stack of wireframes based on the features we've discussed so far! They're by no means final, we'll be going through many iterations to test and revise them. They can been seen at: http://www.sireneast.com/vault/openhippel/draft_wireframes_v1.01/

Soren Jones, after helpfully commented on this thread, joined the team after he arrived in Tokyo, while I was away. In this short amount of time, he had created the basic "Idea" feature based roughly on above wireframes and applied theming and all! His works are shared publicly on Github at https://github.com/organizations/openhippel/ We're diving deeper into using Features to keep everything in code and make it possible for multiple developers to work together through Git.

Finally, I've created a course on P2PU's Webcraft program - http://p2pu.org/webcraft/drupal-social-web-application/ I've said before we're going open the development of Open Hippel as a course, it's true our core Open Hippel team is still very early in terms of development. I think what will happen is that during the course, we will go through the features that has been discussed during previous meetings. We'll talk about how these features "could" translate to Drupal, we've point to the general direction of which modules we "could" use and what APIs are related... and then we'll have everyone go back and try to build a feature each week!

So, things are moving along smoothly! If you're skilled in Drupal and interested in building a product that is meaningful and can potentially help hundreds of thousands of people work together to create a better world, please join us! If you're fluent in English and Japanese, and can help us translate documentations from English into Japanese, please join us! If you're passionate about learning and creating a new education system suitable for the 2010's, please join us!!! Sign up for that P2PU class! Let's make this the awesomest Drupal distro project!!

-Nick

I just want to note that

Soren Jones's picture

I just want to note that github is not up to date. We've since moved to an install profile and have made other significant changes. I'll try to make time to push an update of the features to github this weekend.

Reboot

Soren Jones's picture

CUUSOO decided to use its own platform for LEGO CUUSOO. That killed the project for a while. Now, with Nick's support (he's back in Hong Kong as a co-founder of Makible), I'm rebooting the open innovation platform as HaveGet. The success of Innocentive, OpenIDEO, ChallengePost, and others suggests that there is a need for these kinds of platforms. Mozilla is even building some simple software to facilitate this kind of work.

If you're interested in open innovation, Drupal, Views, Panels, and Features, comment here or ping me.

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