I have been toying with an idea for the past year or so, and I have recently began to poll some different sites in order to see what sort of support I might be able to find. If some of you would be kind enough to give me some well thought suggestions I would apprecaite it, or something in the form of kind critisizm would even be useful.. Also, this dissertation will be short and to the point, if anyone is interested in more details you can either reply here or send me an email and I will be glad to fill in the blanks.
I am looking to form a team of a few web designers/programmers, a graphic artist, and a couple of c++ programmers. This idea starts out very simple, this team would begin developing a website (all hosting provided by me) to be used as a centralized workplace for the team on future projects. It would include items such as project management systems, task lists, project timeline support, communication systems, etc. So the initial project would be to set up a collaboration workplace for future use. Off the top of my head I would allot about 4-6 months of work on this project for myself, so with a few more programmers and and artist it would maybe take 2-3 months.
After this website is fully developed on a hosted server I will personally purchase a dedicated server account to allow us the most use of the web. Each and every programmer will be given a free subdomain off of the main site, or if you have your own domain name I will even be willing to host it as long as you are actively working on projects with the group. All details aside, I want to make this a little as a volunteer assignment as possible.. Any kickback I can possibly come up with for the team I would be glad to do..
The next stage is to begin producing some finely tuned web applications in order to get the team in sync and test out all of the website functionality. The programs would start small and simple, and progress as the team becomes more adept at developing in this environment. Eventually an outside frontend would be created in order to market some of these devices.
Now this is where a bunch of math comes in that I am not going to go into here.. But basically, even though this would be a volunteer effort on the teams part, I want to give back a portion of the profit to anyone working on a project that sells. So even though this woudln't be an offer for employment, there is a possibility to maybe make a few bucks through paypal at some point in the future.
After a year or so, and hopefully a few bucks richer, we would begin to move toward application developement with a strong link to the web (almost every application anymore uses the web for something).
My long term goal for this, if everything worked well and the team did some good work, would be to eventually make a decent name for ourselves and make a break into either gaming or high end application developement. This is what I like to call my 5 year goal..
One of my favorite parts of the idea is that even if nobody gets rich, it might be nice to at least be able to attach your name to a project or two that some people actually use.. I fully intend every project to come with a full "Credits" list with either your real name or an assumed team name, so that we can all get due credit.. Maybe even a little blurb on a resume or something..
There you have it, about a year of planning in a 2 minute blurb. Tear it apart, add to it, let me know what you think. And more importantly let me know if you are interested in helping out.. In a way this is a two fold project, the first part, to find a great group of people and make some cool things happen, and the second part is a sociological experiment to see how well programmers can come together and collaborate on large scale projects without meeting one another.
Ready.. Set.. Reply!
