I consider building a community blog based on roller. It expected to handle about a thousand personal blogs and a main page which will aggregate lastly published articles in personal blogs (may be devided by predefined sections which discussable). It expected to be a social experiment, in which community rather than moderator decide which user should be banned from autopublishing his article on a main page. The ban decision must be accepted by voting of some part of users (voting conditions should be adjustable). Any user can initiate a voting against any user. It also must have an inviting system, so it will be always possible to track who invited a 'bad' user which was exposed to ban.
This task has evolved from the fact that almost all communities which I was interested in (based as a rule on PHP-based forums and social networks) had a totalitarian hirarchy with one or few persons on the top of hirarchy who tends to ban anybody which seems 'bad' to them. I think the totalitarism as phenomenon must be transcend by design, not by hope and faith in 'high aspirations' of a 'good chief'. History teachs that misuse of power thrives everywhere where were appropriate conditions. Namely, where one person could acquire 'God mode=on' for him without carrying responsibility and with limited rights of the others, including the right to know the truth. So my idea is to build an environment where no such conditions and where everybody is responsible for every invited person, and see where it will lead to. How feasible and difficult this task looks like? Where it is better to start from? I have some Java programming skills, namely J2SE, JDBC, SQL, Ant, Struts2, JSP. I almost unfamiliar with Maven, Spring, Selenium, which are used in Roller.
