So you may or may not remember me talking about a little project that I have been working on as part of my computing a-level this year. Well I finally got permission to release the code (not that there is much yet) and share a whole bunch more with you all… so first off… What is Affero?
Well Affero is the latin for the word “contribute”, and this is a fitting code name for this webapp.
Affero is a community contribution wizard that is being developed as part of an A-Level course. It aims to make getting people involved in a community easier for those trying to choose where in the community they want to help out.
The project has its own little blog/change-log going on over at labs.mozhunt.com/affero/blog it will update about once per day with new information about the code, the project, and you may also notice that the main Affero site labs.mozhunt.com/affero will start to take shape as a full on little web application.
Right now there is not too much information on how the project solves the problem. This is to come! I need to get a little more complete before even I know 100% myself… bare with me on this one….
Oh and one final note… the full code/blog/tests/everything except the official documentation of the project as a whole is available on github.com/fuzzyfox/affero.
UPDATE: Affero just got a logo!
Tags: community, computing, mozilla, news, project, update, web
Cool. Glad to see news about this. And it fits in well with the plans we have for evolving the existing Get Involved pages to make them more useful for people wanting to contribute to Mozilla.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla.org/Contribute/Get_Involved_Evolved
David
I’m very interested to see this develop. When you say “except for official documentation”, is that because it isn’t written yet? Let me know if you want (and are allowed to get) any advice or help with that.
When I say official documentation I mean the documentation that goes through the whole thing, i.e. project background, problem analysis, about mozilla, feasibility analysis, etc… as for code documentation that is going to be coming. I am using phpdoc to trawl all my inline comments and create some nice documentation. The hard part is getting the security into the application and ensuring that I write tests before I write code…. and knowing what to test for and what data to use in the tests. Oh and I am going to be attempting to get the full documentation made public….
Thanks for the offer of help though… I might yet take you up on that… depends
Know any great UI mockup tools? For websites I should add
You might have wanted to choose a name that doesn’t already have a major association in the FOSS world, namely the Affero GPL.
argh! Well, this is the third name I have given this project…. I think that the name clash is going to happen no matter what…. so… gahr, I will just stick with the same name, it is only an internal project name really. I only gave it a name as Community Contribution Wizard is so long to type all the time, and, I don’t like the acronym….
If it’s a wizard you could always call it Gandalf, although that leads to a different kind of name confusion in Mozilla
For a mockup tool, you may want to look at Mockery. It’s an app that uses Mozilla code, so may be worth trying.
http://getmockery.com/
David
Actually I like that idea…. hmmmm time to email the man himself and see if he minds