Teem

Teem, an app focused on increasing the participation and sustainability of commons-based peer production communities (e.g. Wikipedia, free software, Arduino), although it may be applied to other open online communities (networks, open organizations) or even social movements (social centers, collectives). After doing intensive social research and prototype testing, we are aware of the main needs of the different roles within a community (following the classical 1-9-90 rule: core, occasional collaborators and users), and the tools they typically lack (related to management and internal organization, listing the subprojects available and the needs of each). The app is grounded on these findings to reduce the frustrations of all participants and increase participation (90s=>9, 9s=>1)... while providing a kind-of project management tool for communities (but informal/liquid/open to fit the context) together with a work-space with collaborative edition (like a google-doc) and a group chat (like a whatsapp/telegram group). You have a quick presentation of this in http://tiny.cc/teem-slides and the current web-app in http://teem.works There is also an Android app encapsulating the web-app: http://tiny.cc/teemapp Code in https://github.com/P2Pvalue/teem

Ideal candidate:

Teem is interested in proactive candidates with experience in Javascript, HTML and CSS, and ideally experience with the AngularJS framework. Qualities that we would welcome are initiative, creativity, and interest/experience with online communities and/or social movements. You may check Github’s open issues and the project ideas below to have an overall ideas of the possible evolutions of Teem. Of course, GSoC candidates are encouraged to adapt our proposals to their interests and we are very open to new ideas or unexpected evolutions of chosen ones.

Project ideas:

Meeting minutes tool (based on our pad)=

Meetings are crucial in collaborative communities, but there does not exist a proper tool that provides an appropriate solution to taking meeting minutes and its multiple issues: sorting the agenda, prioritize certain points where there is not enough time, curating a good record after several meetings, filtering tasks and agreements to communicate them in an efficient way to people who couldn't attend… Teem has already a real-time collaborative space (“pad”, from etherpad) ready for each working group, and this project may extend it for the specific use of taking minutes.

Knowledge recommended: Javascript (ideally AngularJS), HTML and CSS. Mentors: Samer shassan@cyber.law.harvard.edu, Tapi atapiador@ucm.es

Matchmaking newcomer skills with community needs

When people start using a tool such as Teem, they come with a set of skills and interests. On the other hand, community projects have needs to fulfill, i.e. they have gaps or missing skills that are slowing down their development. The challenge is matching them, connecting newcomers with communities appealing to them. Ideally, this should be done in an easy and enjoyable manner, avoiding tedious forms for both newcomers and community managers. This project may explore the use of profiling, recommenders, tag clouds, and machine learning techniques.

Knowledge recommended: Javascript (ideally AngularJS), HTML and CSS. Mentors: Samer shassan@cyber.law.harvard.edu, Tapi atapiador@ucm.es

Reputation-based or gratitude-based immaterial rewards

Participants in a collaborative communities are sometimes rewarded in several ways, e.g. reputation (e.g. Ebay), badges (e.g. Stack Exchange), thanks (e.g. Open Subtitles). Taking benefit that real communities are using the tool, we would like to experiment with different types of rewards, and see how participants react to them.

Knowledge recommended: Javascript (ideally AngularJS), HTML and CSS. Mentors: Samer shassan@cyber.law.harvard.edu, Tapi atapiador@ucm.es