Separate the civic.json registry from the CivicNeeds site

[robdodson]

Hi @ryanbriones,

@GovInTrenches pointed me to your video from the National Day of Civic Hacking event. I was emailing him and a few other folks asking where is the "home" of civic hacking, i.e. is there a rubygems/npm/bower of civic hacking and if not, should there be? In my mind I was picturing something like the bower registry (take's a while to load) where I could just hop on, dig through some projects, see what's active and what tech stack is being used and then dive into their GitHub page for more info. What you described in your talk with civic.json is basically the same thing I was imagining. So yes, some kind of civic.json registry is a big 👍 from me.

My only objection is that I think you should separate that work from the CivicNeeds form/site because I'm not sure if they're really addressing the same thing. They're kind of related but they're also kind of not. Obviously it would be great to have the description from the form end up in the civic.json file but I think anyone could just put that in there. I guess in my gut I feel like I've seen other civic hacking projects that amount to "submit your problem with X" but they fail to achieve any kind of network effect. I'm not trying to be discouraging I'm just thinking that maybe a better way to approach things would be:

• get the registry working first.
• get the metadata.
• then build the tools off of the metadata.

So put the word out there that devs working on civic projects should run a command to get their project in the registry and then if that idea sticks, figure out what the next step is. That's how things are working with npm and bower these days and it seems to work well.

Btw sorry if any of this comes off as rude or too frank, definitely not trying to be, I just really like the idea and wanted to give an honest opinion since it's something I've been thinking about as well.

🍰

[ryanbriones]

Thanks @robdodson! These ideas are very new and not really fleshed out. I assume zero ownership over the ideas. Really I wanted to quickly "open source" the ideas in order to get more people involved, either contributing or maintaining. The fact is I may never have the time to work on them or someone will become much more passionate than myself about them and take the torch.

So, I'd say if you are interested in developing civic.json as a separate project, go for it. I'd be happy to contribute any of the ideas that we brainstormed on it to help out the process.

[robdodson]

That's awesome. I'm going to see if I can find some time to work on this. I'll report back when I've made a bit of progress.