Open Source UI

In an effort to help share around the love I am spreading the word about Open Source UI. What is Open Source UI though?

• Open source, moderated web interfaces
• Allowing the community to innovate the services they use
• A way to help accelerate development and growth

Open Source, Open Idea, Open Service

I love the idea of collaboration and sharing. In my opinion internet ideas are best implemented when they are discussed, changed and worked on by more then one individual. With many common open source projects today such as WordPress, Drupal or StatusNet the community is invited to take part in shaping the future of the project. Many are able to make their ideas known and are able to contribute to the projects by coding, documenting or acting as support staff. The community is what makes the service or application thrive.

Open Source UI to me is the concept that the community can see, suggest ideas for and modify the code that styles or defines workflows  on a particular service. This is achieved by making available the Web UI that is in use for a particular service (Melative, Twitter, Vanilla) on a code repository such as Git or SVN. By allowing anybody to view and modify the code as they see fit and by submitting back the content they alter the source project.

This is probably best moderated by a respected community member or by a core project team member. The idea is to allow anybody to checkout and commit back ideas or changes. This can be tested on a development environment to see whether the idea works or is an improvement. Even allowing commits back on a small scale by trusted community members can alleviate the need for someone to work constantly on the UI as well as the core.

A body of knowledge is built up on the project that is not stuck just with the core team and thus allows the project pace to pick up. Without the need to constantly refer to core team members the progress on accessible areas may increase and with the help of a moderator the UI can alter to suit the community needs or likes as the project progresses.

As the changes are confirmed as working and liked they can be merged into the core service. This allows the core service to develop and alter at a stable rate as the community wants.

These are of course just my ideas and to be honest they may not actually work. The point is I think it could work and it would allow many services that exist today to leverage the power of the community even further. This isn’t about making money off the community that supports you or reducing labor costs. This is about involvement and collaboration on a truly open ecosystem.

How is this any different to normal contributions to a project?

In some cases such as with Melative, the Web UI is actually just an optional layer to the application beneath. Melative makes use of an API framework to do most if not all of it’s processing. The Web UI is just a layer on top which interfaces with the API to provide a browser friendly version of the service.

This makes the Open Source UI idea different to just committing to the application function. This is about allowing the service that people use everyday to be modified and updated by community members on the interface side of things, separate from the underlying functions.

It’s allowing the community to alter the theme and workflow of the service if you will.