Ridesurf
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A brief summary of the Rideshare/Carpooling Feature proposed for CouchSurfing.com
Contents |
Motivation
Many CouchSufers already hitchhike or carpool. The active CS Ridesurf group testifies to the demand for Rideshares within CouchSurfing. A CS Ridesurf feature would:
- make the existing task of finding a ride or a passenger much easier between CouchSurfers
- Encourage ridesharing by bringing attention to the activity and facilitating it
- Extend the CouchSurfing experience into the voyage itself
- Allow for a richer matrix of references, as couch surfers shared more with more people
Audience
- Couchsurfers without vehicles
- Couchsurfers with vehicles who want to
- save gas money
- share driving
- or enjoy company in the car
Implementation Concepts
CouchSurfing should include a feature so that people can enter their current intermediary and end destinations (with date/time) in their profile, and folks interested in getting a ride could search for those terms. At first a simple place-name-only ridesurf organizing feature may suffice, but in the future ridesurfing features should use more intelligent geo-aware software (GIS or other maps tools), enabling software to figure out if or when a ride-offerer will be passing through a given intermediary point in their itinerary, or to help stitch together an itinerary for a traveler.
As a starting approach, we can develop a feature where, alongside the list of couches in any town, Couchsurfing.com will provide a list of rides, either arriving in that town or leaving from that town. This list will be generated from the cities people have listed as origination points and intermediary points.
Precedent services
See Survey of CarPooling services
Documents
- links to mock-ups or documents about this change
There is also a Google Group for open discussions about this feature.
Technical Steps
Step by step, what is technically necessary to make this happen?
Start a new site
- easy to create new profile on new site:
- Make the CS code modular, so that there can be a common code base for the ridesurf website and CouchSurfing.
Choose a programming language/framework
Ruby/Rails
Shiny videos that gives you the "WOW I want to do it!" feeling/motivation. See http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts
Cool now.
wonderful MVC, sweet database migration functionality
no intrinsic login/authentication (but there's an OpenID Login Generator available)
Lots of developers (also a lot of "me-too" developers just following the big wave, with python there are maybe more experienced developers, not sure)
Python/Django
Presentation http://itmaurer.com/clepy/htdocs/media/presentation/presentation.html
Videos?
The free book at http://www.djangobook.com/
Python/Turbogears
2o minutes Tutorial video http://files.turbogears.org/video/20MinuteWiki2nd.mov
- the video is not as shining and as convinging as the rails one, there is no scaffolding, ... uhm, not too powerful
- Ruby's scaffolding is imho only useful in rapid prototyping. even when modifying a tutorial i quickly abandoned it. --- tiara
20 minutes tutorial wiki http://docs.turbogears.org/1.0/Wiki20/Page1
Python/web.py
Python/Plone
Heavy video about why plone is better than all the others http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov
Security and identity already well integrated and available
Very mature, a lot of organizations chosed it, see http://plone.org/about/sites , among which also big NGOs such as oxfam, amnesty, or FSF.org, gnu.org etc ...
Steep learning curve
Videos http://plone.org/about/movies http://plone.org/events/conferences/seattle-2006/presentations/session-videos
Plone supports openid ... http://www.openidenabled.com/software/plone
Licenses
- GNU General Public License for the software
- Creative Commons ShareAlike Attribution for all texts and graphic design
Support
I support this initiative. However, I think it should be looked at in context with the larger vision [1] of CShares.
