REPLY Who wants to share models (SD6858)

[SDMAIL Bobby Powers]

Posted by  "Bobby Powers" <bobbypowers at gmail.com>

Hello,

I'm very interested in sharing models, even though I'm a student and 
don't have many (yet!) of my own.  I think this is kind of a catch-22, 
people don't share models because its not easy, and its not easy because 
there has not been a big enough demand to make it worthwhile for 
commercial vendors to make it happen.   Since we're talking about open 
models, there is a great parallel to open source software.  There are 
several sites like SourceForge [1] and Google Code [2] which give free 
hosting to open source projects.  They provide an amount of webspace, a 
system for providing downloads of the software (including different 
versions), and ways to back up the source code (version control systems, 
which incrementally keep track of changes in the code, allowing you to 
see who did what when multiple people are working together, and go back 
to earlier versions when stuff doesn't work).  They also provide a 
common place for people to go to search for open source projects 
(SourceForge hosts almost 180 thousand different projects!), to see if 
there is something they can adapt to their needs before starting a new 
project of their own.

I think what we need is something similar for modelers: a free service 
that allows you to quickly add a site for your model, upload it, link to 
or upload related publications, and perhaps have a small wiki about it 
where you can give people an introduction, and others can add feedback 
or share what they've done with it.  It would also be neat for the 
server to be able to read your model and automatically create some 
content: it could simply be webpages with the sketches as pictures and 
graphs of the results to start.

Sure not every model people will share will be useful, but if there 
isn't a place to exchange models, people won't have nearly the same 
ability to collaborate.  I would love to work on this with people.

yours,
Bobby Powers

[1] http://sourceforge.net/index.php
[2] http://code.google.com/hosting
Posted by  "Bobby Powers" <bobbypowers at gmail.com>
posting date  Thu, 3 Apr 2008 15:44:58 +0200