A week after Poderopedia launched its public beta, the response it’s been getting has been huge. So far, close to 800 users have registered on the website; it’s receiving an average of 26 new facts and connections per day; there are request to create local Poderopedia chapters from people in Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Canada and Mexico; and there’s interest in using its code and platform in a few newsrooms that we can’t disclose yet.
OPEN, CLEAN, UNDERSTANDABLE AND REUSABLE CODE
Releasing code and a platform is something that’s in Poderopedia’s strategic 2013 road map. To do so, we want to invite you to join a new and ambitious challenge: Help us release our code and release it right.
As you know, Poderopedia is a not-for-profit and open-source project. This means we have the challenge of releasing our code for anyone who wants to use it anywhere in the world for whatever they want, under the GPL license. (See details in here.)
The problem to solve is this: Just because something is open source does not necessarily mean that someone will use the code.
We’ve seen many projects that are released where nobody uses their code, either because the code is “dirty” or “messy” or because it lacks the necessary documentation.
For this reason, we need your help. Our goal is to release clean, understandable, reusable and well-documented code so that in this way we meet one of the original missions of this project: Give what we’ve learned back to the community so that others can use it for their own projects and ideas.
WHAT WE NEED
Volunteers to review the code, make proposals, and recommendations to release the code, and if you have time and like the idea, work with us on it.
WHAT WE OFFER IN EXCHANGE
We have no money for this, but we can be good friends — we have space on our website and a blog to highlight those who help us. We also have cool stickers to give you, and invitations to future workshops, activities, meetups at our office, and the best coffee in downtown Santiago, Chile.
HOW TO HELP
If you’re interested in helping, please contact us at team@poderopedia.com or join our User Group where we’ve opened a “thread” for this conversation.
P.S.: On a small side note, we want to thank the awesome Chilean development community, especially the members of Chile Ágil (Agile Chile) for their tremendous support during the public beta. A few days ago, we posted a request for ethical hackers to help us test Poderopedia’s security, and the response was, to say the least, amazing. In less than two days, many volunteers offered to support us, so a huge thanks to them. Their help in promoting transparency and opening up networks of influence and power is invaluable, as our team is small and their support means a great deal to us.
Miguel Paz is a Chilean journalist and founder of Poderomedia foundation and Poderopedia; Knight News Challenge and StartupChile winner ProfUDP.cl; former deputy director @elmostrador and eternal muckraker. His work has been published in two books about the best Chilean investigative journalism.