The calm before the storm
Original
As some of you may be aware, I had a plan some time back to create a distributed gallery system. Admittedly, I had completely forgotten about it until recently, but various events this week brought it back to the front of my mind.
Introducing . . .
The Confederated Art, Literature, and Music gallery system
This is still in the brainstorming stage, so nothing is written in stone; I don't have any hard definitions for what data is stored, how it moves around, or how everything comes together, but the essential idea is that every user has their own website so we can see and comment on art they created, liked, critiqued, etc, and to provide a means to collect art from everyone else they're watching. The key difference from other art galleries is that artists and other users can create their website on any dynamic-language supporting server (once software is available), and still have full use every feature, without requiring anyone to create a new account with them.
As an example, aggregators (as examples, think of the browsing and front pages of sites like FA and dA) can be set up to allow artists to register their galleries to be viewed in one common place, and it would simply be a stripped down gallery that only provides public access to its watch feed. Their administrators can, of course, set any policy for the art they link to, or use tagging to filter art out, with the penalty of de-listing artists who violate these policies (or just filter that art out). The nice thing is, nothing will stop someone else from setting up a new aggregator with different policies on exclusion, or even with no exclusion policy.
Another possibility with the system would be communities where anyone can sign up for a centrally hosted account, perfect for watchers to collect in one area (or even full-fledged galleries, which means existing sites would be able to update their code to support the CALM protocols).
In essence the plan for this project is to create a full-featured art gallery system that can integrate cleanly with any other compatible system, creating a scalable art network that doesn't force artists to pick and choose among walled gardens.
Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, or volunteers to help design and build this system?
As some of you may be aware, I had a plan some time back to create a distributed gallery system. Admittedly, I had completely forgotten about it until recently, but various events this week brought it back to the front of my mind.
Introducing . . .
The Confederated Art, Literature, and Music gallery system
This is still in the brainstorming stage, so nothing is written in stone; I don't have any hard definitions for what data is stored, how it moves around, or how everything comes together, but the essential idea is that every user has their own website so we can see and comment on art they created, liked, critiqued, etc, and to provide a means to collect art from everyone else they're watching. The key difference from other art galleries is that artists and other users can create their website on any dynamic-language supporting server (once software is available), and still have full use every feature, without requiring anyone to create a new account with them.
As an example, aggregators (as examples, think of the browsing and front pages of sites like FA and dA) can be set up to allow artists to register their galleries to be viewed in one common place, and it would simply be a stripped down gallery that only provides public access to its watch feed. Their administrators can, of course, set any policy for the art they link to, or use tagging to filter art out, with the penalty of de-listing artists who violate these policies (or just filter that art out). The nice thing is, nothing will stop someone else from setting up a new aggregator with different policies on exclusion, or even with no exclusion policy.
Another possibility with the system would be communities where anyone can sign up for a centrally hosted account, perfect for watchers to collect in one area (or even full-fledged galleries, which means existing sites would be able to update their code to support the CALM protocols).
In essence the plan for this project is to create a full-featured art gallery system that can integrate cleanly with any other compatible system, creating a scalable art network that doesn't force artists to pick and choose among walled gardens.
Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, or volunteers to help design and build this system?