I’ve spent some time over the past weeks thinking about and writing up a new specification for the Project Directory – now known as PROD. As previously discussed in my post entitled Out of my mind on doap and ohloh (my god that was in March!) it’s all about drawing in project information from a range of sources, twisting it about a bit, analysing it and producing metrics and presenting it in a friendly, socially-enabled way.

The challenge is taking this sea of information (something that is inherently large and complex) and attenuating it until it is easily digestible chimes rather well with much of what we have been discussing in our newly materialised department The Institute for Educational Cybernetics here at Bolton. By taking a modular approach to digesting the information produced by and about a project I’m envisaging “boiling it all down” to a series of activity indicators showing (for example) that a given project has made a high number of commits to it’s SVN repository over the last month, relative of course to how many commits all the other projects have made. Other metrics would include a buzz-o-meter to measure general web activity referring to the project (sourced from places such as Technorati and Delicious).

In terms of the project itself it’s going to be done in a rapid and sensible kind of way with regular monthly milestones for new functionality! There is a bit of a discussion going on about platforms (rails or php? I’m desperate to learn rails and this will be a good opportunity! On the other hand I code php in my sleep…)

PROD itself! (prod.cetis.org.uk)

Trac instance (trac.cetis.org.uk/trac.cgi/prod)
Including mockups, milestones, wikiness, tickets and all manner of trac goodness