over 2 years ago
Someone recently pointed me to another popular service collecting OS software development metrics:
http://cia.navi.cx
I'd like to hear from Ohloh's maintainers where you guys are planning to position yourselves with respect to this or other potential competitors.
CIA is quite flexible in terms of stats syndication and real-time notification to IRC channels, while it lags behind Ohloh in terms of richness of metrics collected.
over 2 years ago
AFAIK, CIA's entire source code is open and nobody have yet duplicate CIA website. It is pretty popular and a non-profit effort.
I believe the excuse of not being open is finally over?
over 2 years ago
Greetings Dartar & Kiba,
I saw the cia.navi.cx site a while ago. It appears to focus on informing people on up-to-the-minute updates to projects - presumably to enable development teams to stay current on recent changes. While that's a great concept that serves a very useful purpose, Ohloh isn't focused on that scenario. We're really focused (as our home page says) on mapping the open source world through metrics.
We came up with the concept of Ohloh simply out of frustration of manually evaluating Open Source projects. After your 20th time of reading the CVS logs and examining the code, you eventually think to yourself "there might be room for some automated tool here..." ;-).
I guess one could argue that there is some feature overlap between Ohloh and cia.navi.cx (commit counts, for example) - but I honestly don't see ourselves as competitors.
How about you? How do you compare Ohloh to other sites? Is there anything we should focus on that would be more useful to you?
Many thanks for your feedback,
-jay
over 2 years ago
Hi Jay,
thanks for your reply. I guess most users would agree that the killer feature we all miss is the ability to syndicate Ohloh's data :) I won't repeat here what is already being discussed in other threads about an API for Ohloh.
Just to give an example of a nice feature provided by CIA which would be welcome in Ohloh: author activity can be syndicated in CIA via feeds, whereas to be able to display author activity in Ohloh, not only one has to actually open the author page, but also to have a Flash-enabled browser.
My 2 cents, maybe other have further ideas to add.
over 2 years ago
Hi Dartar, Kiba, Jason,
This is Micah Dowty, I run the CIA site. I only recently became aware of Ohloh, but I can say it does look like an interesting site. I had to try it out by adding CIA itself ;)
There is some overlap between Ohloh and CIA. However, as Jason noticed, CIA's primary goal is to deliver immediate notification and up-to-date feeds in a variety of ways. It happens that CIA can also be used to browse projects and to find relationships between projects and development communities, but CIA isn't going to be another Ohloh or SWiK or Freshmeat.
I've been thinking lately about how CIA should best relate with other web sites in this space. I've also wanted to change the site's name for a while. The name "CIA" is largely a historical artifact, and doesn't have a particularly obvious connection to the site's purpose. CIA needs to more clearly and obviously define its niche.
CIA is also in a unique position relative to most (all?) of these other web sites. CIA is still largely a one-man project, running on hardware and bandwidth I pay for out of my own pocket. CIA is a personal project started way back in 2003. It started out of necessity, and grew due to mostly-unsolicited popularity. I've been working on it off and on since then, but CIA is nobody's day job. Most of the site is still late-2003 era web design, and it shows. I've been working hard lately in my spare time to give CIA a much-needed facelift.
In short, I don't think CIA can or should compete directly with Ohloh. I do think that the two projects are complementary in nature, and any collaboration between us could only be a good thing.
--Micah
over 2 years ago
Will CIA support Publish-Subscribe in the near feature using XMPP?
over 2 years ago
I would certainly like CIA to support XMPP as well as a couple other methods for syndicating content in real-time. There are infrastructure improvements that need to happen first, but it's certainly on the TODO radar. Thanks!
I realize that CIA users currently don't have a great forum for discussing problems or making suggestions. I don't want to clutter Ohloh's forums with such things, of course. If anyone else has suggestions, please use the "Feedback" form on the CIA site. Very shortly I'll be rolling out a CIA blog where I'll post updates and start discussions on future features.
--Micah
over 2 years ago
it's all of this real? :| omg! GL