Daily pages - February 04, 2022

Building an OT3 Project Web Site

Building an OT3 site can be as easy or as difficult as you want it to be. The kind of web site you build as home for your OT3 project will depend on the kind of web space you use and your skills at creating web sites. To make things as simple as possible, we’ve created a series of web site templates that you can use as the foundation for your site. Take a look at the options below and decide which one fits your needs.

Here are some versions we’ve seen:

Github Project: This kind of project uses Github or a similar site like GitLab or Bitbucket to store files and create community. These tools offer a number of great tools that could help with collaboration, like wikis, issue tracking, and pull request management. They make it easy for someone to fork your project if they feel thy can use it to move in a different direction.

Website + discussion board: The Hovalin project is an example of this format. They have a simple website where the project is explained and the 3D printing file is available, then they link to a Reddit thread to manage discussion of the project. It’s through that thread that people make suggestions or upload modified versions of the file to be integrated or offered as alternative designs.

Creating a Family of Projects

It’s worth considering whether the specific project that you’re setting up is large enough to contain your larger goals. Specific tools, techniques and technologies are usually the result of a larger idea. The mouse trap is a specific solution to the larger goal of keeping rodents

For example, this web site came about because I realized that the specific projects I was working on were aspects of a much larger passion of mine – to help make the world work better and to harness the energies of every-day people to do that.

Dealing with Incompatible Design Directions

As a project is being developed, it’s not uncommon for there to be fundamental differences within the community as to where the project should go in the future. In these cases, the disagreeing parties may need to split into two groups, each taking the design as it exists at the time of the split and developing it according to their individual visions.

This is not necessarily a bad thing in that it allows a problem to be approached in multiple directions. It may well be that one solution is appropriate for some parts of the world and not in others.

Principles of Comprehensive Design

The main objective in setting up an OT3 project is to create a mechanism by which our current solution to a given problem – in the form of a tool, technique, or technology – can be continuously improved. Exactly what constitutes an improvement is not always clear, but there are some principles that can help to ensure that steady progress is made.

Ways to Improve Your Project

Once we have a project that is working well, we tend to think that there isn’t much else to be done. Here are some ideas to help spark new interest in your idea:

design for compatibility with other projects

design versions of your idea for different manufacturing methods

Looking at some of this writing, I’m wondering why I shouldn’t create a pattern language for creating open artifacts projects. That seems like it totally makes sense from a documentation standpoint. I may have even started something like this at one point, but I haven’t come across the files yet.

There’s nothing magical about pattern languages, but the concepts of deciding how to manage the project and the people all seem like they would fit well under a language like that, versus a more standard set of documentation, for example, like the ones for Jekyll itself.

Also, I wonder about creating my own GitLab hosting site for these kinds of projects. GitLab is essentially an open source Github, and for not very much money, I could create a GitLab for Open Artifacts website. I’m not sure how much I can modify the website to make it lean toward open artifacts projects, but it seems like I’d probably have total control.

This is something I dreamed of doing back when SourceForge was the leading open source repo system. I wanted to create my own for OT3 project, but never really thought I’d have the resources or knowledge to do it. Now, I think it’s really possible.

it could really be an easy way to invite people to create these kinds of projects. I can say, hey, I love your book and would like to create an open artifacts version of it. You can set up a free repo on my website and host it there.

Makes me wonder if openartifacts.com could be the place for it. It could integrate with GitLab and include other places that projects might be hosted. I need to find out more about Gitlab as an open source project.