My friend Mike Hoye has done something important for the web:
It’s small, just a start, but the world doesn’t work this way yet and I think a lot more of it should. PatchCulture.org is live. Might work, might not. I’m hopeful.
This is exciting for me because it’s the realization of the thinking I wrote about here. Mike’s done one better and named this gesture, making it available for others to use:
With your help, the Web can be the largest, most vibrant open-source community in the world.
That sounds right to me. Please share this, and help Mike achieve his goal.
One Comment
This concept would be better served by hooking it up to one of those ‘comment on any page on the net and other people will see it’ tools.
Personally I can’t see that many developers are going to bother “find email of author or owner’. That part involves disclosing your own email address, then potentially getting stuck with an author/owner who doesn’t have the knowledge to apply the fix and who could then start a long email nag thread with you until they can fix it.
Much better to have a common-comment type system where I can sign up, open a sidebar when I see a crap page and submit patches to that sidebar. The owner/author can then come along and opt in to receiving that feedback and applying the changes if they are able to or want to.
A bonus would be to write a Firebug extension that outputs all on-the-fly changes from Firebug into this common-comment sidebar community. Even better would be a screenshot facility. This would allow a developer to make live changes to a broken site in Firebug, click a button that sends the suggested patches to the common-comment sidebar community and throws in a “this is what it will look like if you apply my suggested changes” screenshot.
If this concept were to really take off, eventually it would be a good facility for allowing developers with some free time to potentially earn money. For example a site owner/author could put a comment in the common-comment sidebar community along the lines of “hey, I know this site doesn’t work as well in Firefox but I’ve not got the time to fix it. I’ll pay $ X to anybody who can make it look the same in Firefox as it does in IE”.