Notes 2009 3 18

cameron, alan, collin, and brush were there. we brought cameron up to
speed on what’s happened so far, and went into some detail regarding

a) how the aggregator could make things much easier for people (ie.
various model use cases);

b) how the data would flow, emphasizing that the links between (say)
reviews, people, and offers/requests would happen using fairly
interesting algorithms on the business side of the aggregator client;

c) how the preferences would work, how to make them maximally easy for
new folks to use (including importing friends’ prefs), using neural-net
style learning, but also able to be very fine-tuned in context-specific
ways.

we also discussed the broader “open currency” world, some of the legal
and interpersonal tangles involved, and assured cameron (and ourselves)
that nothing like that would be involved in this project.

we reviewed a recent meeting with more “mainstream” (ie. chris
pirillo-linked) tech folks, specifically recognizing that there’s lots
of aggregator UIs out there, and we’d as a first step find one to build
next to and then funnel our stuff out into it. (this requires more
research.)

we talked about three main focus areas, happening in parallel:

A) evangelize to “data pools” and help them make their data available
over microformatted RSS

B) organize user base of organizations and movements already seeking
this kind of functionality in portland, to co-develop key initial
features with dev’t team

C) develop proof-of-concept aggregator.

cameron is psyched to focus on ‘C’. we talked about the economic needs
in order to quickly get such a project moving. some money could be
helpful (there are some possibilities) but the focus could perhaps
better be on barter itself: we talked about organizing users & orgs to
provide goods and services (coffee, massages, bike repair, etc.) to
developers. this would be a great way to accomplish B and C together.

that’s about it. it was a good, high energy, exciting meeting.

check out http://wiki.github.com/brush/econix for revised (hopefully
clearer) intro dox.