You might also talk to the http://oss4lib.org/ folks to see what they did.
Kevin On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 11:22 PM, Nate Vack <njv...@wisc.edu> wrote: > On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 2:09 PM, Peter Murray <peter.mur...@lyrasis.org> > wrote: >> On Jul 15, 2011, at 2:59 PM, Mike Taylor wrote: >>> >>> Isn't this pretty much what FreshMeat is for? >>> http://freshmeat.net/ >> >> It is similar in concept to Freshmeat, but the scope is limited to >> library-oriented software (which might be too use-specific for Freshmeat and >> certainly harder to find among the vast expanse of non-library-oriented >> stuff). > > You might look at NITRC[1], which has tried very hard to do the same > thing for neuroscience software in addition to providing project > hosting like Sourceforge. They get funded by some federal grant > thing[2]. > > Unfortunately, they've also found that the world wasn't really looking > for a site to review and host a small subset of open-source projects, > so their usage isn't high. They've convinced some projects to come > live in their domain, so they seem to attract enough funding to stay > online, but they've never succeeded in becoming much of a community. > And the "people who do neuroscience" crowd is probably two orders of > magnitude larger than the "people who do open-source in libraries" > crowd -- so building a vibrant community will be even harder in this > case. > > The real problem for me is that their site doesn't seem to warrant > enough attention to really be made usable or stay up reliably. So if > you want to get software that's hosted only by them, it can be really > frustrating. It's like a crappy FreshMeat combined with a crappy, > unreliable Sourceforge. > > My ultimate take: you can probably do something more interesting with > your grant money than building a FreshMeat-alike. > > Either way, you might talk to the NITRC folks about their experiences > -- I'm speaking as an end-user, not as one of their team. > > Cheers, > -Nate > > 1: http://www.nitrc.org/ > > 2: The National Institutes of Health Blueprint for Neuroscience Research >
