Anyway, the idea of this site is simple. I find myself working on many projects and helping many people. So, I decided, instead of hiding my work behind so many people/companies, I would just start to expose what I do publicly. I feel that many people would benefit from this, and so, OpenUpon was born! Now that I have this site, what will I do? I don’t have any subscribers yet. Nobody is listening to what I have to say. I am basically writing to myself :)

The Idea of this site is to work on projects that are very public facing. What I mean is that the projects I work on, through OpenUpon, will be blogged about, put into a wiki, and talked about in a podcast.

Why does this matter to you? Ahhh, good question! This is important to you because you get to tell me what to do! You heard right, this site is like having your own contractor or freelancer, for FREE!

What is the catch? Well of course there’s a catch, otherwise this would not be the real world. The idea is that I provide solutions that the majority of my subscribers need.

How does this work? My subscribers have the ability to write directly to me, or in the wiki. Then there will be voting polls where people can vote on lists of projects that I have compiled, from all of you!

So, this will allow the community to collaborate and come up with useful software solutions that they need. We can communicate through the wiki and other mediums. I will stay active with this community and compile a final list of possible projects. The list gathering and compiling will occur in normal iterations. The idea, to start, is to create multiple small projects that I can work on simultaneously. This will allow people to vote often, getting me to produce more!

I will be bloging about my progress and communicating very openly to the public, regarding the status of each project. I will also be asking the community to actively participate with designing requirements and providing other information that I need to make the product that you want! The more ongoing feedback the better! That also applies to me, the more often I can get workable demos into people’s hands the faster things can be verified and given the thumbs up or down.

In the programming world, a team of programmers that do the same thing that I have described here, call this “Agile software development”. I am taking this to the next level and doing with with anyone that wants to take part!

Where will this idea go? Well, honestly… it will either flop, or it will succeed. If it is the latter, then I will look into having a bigger team doing the same thing (instead of just me)!

So, because I have no subscribers yet, which it could take a while, I need something from you. Please tell as many people as you can, about this website. There are no requirements for someone to take part on this site. You don’t need any special knowledge. All I ask is that you have problems and you need solutions.

In the meantime, I will continue doing what I do. I will be assigning myself projects to work on. I will be doing this publicly, through the website, for everyone to see. Since I am the only person involved at this point my majority vote wins! Once people start joining, I will be immediately shifted to majority vote!

If I do end up getting many subscribers, I will create a site that will start giving people rankings and trust levels. I am thinking that we could rate people based on their abilities, for instance, the ability to gather requirements that rarely need to be changed.

Hope this works out for all of us! My next posting will kick off the first project, so stay tuned!

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