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 <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 2:09 PM, Peter Murray <[log in to unmask]> 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
>
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