Thursday, October 03, 2013

SacredPy seeking collaborators

I'm looking for collaborators who want to build web programming experience on an interesting project...

During my job search, I was contacted by Kai Schraml, a seminary graduate who wants to scratch an itch. Seminarians have a serious need to discuss, debate, and seek consensus on the translations of difficult texts, like sacred scriptures. But the software tools currently available for the purpose are closed-source and expensive. That just seems wrong - not just because seminary students are broke, but because of the nature of the texts themselves. After all, Jesus released his teachings under a very strong open-source license!*

So we're starting to work on an alternative, provisionally called "SacredPy". (It could be applied to any difficult texts, of course, so if Beowulf is sacred to you, have at it.) I'm quite employed now, but I'm dabbling at it a bit for the sheer interest and open-sourcey glory of it all. It's possible income could eventually come from this project - Kai could tell you more about the prospects - but certainly not soon, so this is no substitute for proper employment. But it might be great resume builder for a new Python programmer. It looks like we'll most likely build something atop Askbot, a Django-based project, so if you'd like to move into the thriving "experienced Djano developer" segment of the economy...

Let me know at moc.liamg@nilved.enirehtac and we'll talk!

* - Matthew 10:8 - δωρεὰν ἐλάβετε, δωρεὰν δότε ("Freely you have received, freely give")

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There's quite a lot of complexity here:

* A whole tree of source texts with relations between them
* Sets of translations into a particular target language, with relations between them
* Comments and discussions on those translations (which you're looking at)

Items 1 and 2 have always seemed to me to be begging for version control tools. In that case, could Item 3 use code review tools?

Although I can see that the well-managed moderation that systems like StackExchange and AskBot are designed to handle would be useful here too...