I am very happy to announce the release of Dutch; our knowledge sharing network tool.
We stumbled across the idea of Dutch when we were playing a few weeks ago. We were looking at a way to share snippets of knowledge quickly - an example being links to web sites and videos. The idea is simple enough; can we create a tag and comment under it to create a tagcloud of knowledge.
Dutch gives you a simple way to make a tag (or a "network") under which you can post information and comment on other peoples information.
We give you a notifications screen where you can see activity from both networks you are a fan of and people you want to follow.
Dutch is
free software and released under the GPL (version 3) license. Please visit the
Dutch product page at
http://www.barnraiser.org/dutch for more information, downloads, case studies, guides and a technical specification.
We want your feedback
Forums have all sorts of tools to moderate and manage dialog. Dutch has non of these. Networks can be made by anyone and added to by anyone. The most popular networks filter up to the top naturally. Please play and resist the immediate urge to compare it to a forum:) It is a lightweight product and we want to focus on the knowledge sharing and social aspects of the tool.
We want to know what you think of it and examples of how you would use it.
We want to know about bugs and features that you like / dislike.
One "feature" that is not yet fully developed is that you can plug-in URL parsers. We have one for DIGG which today is hard coded with a Barnraiser account and we have one for Youtube which is a hack and does not make use of their API. Type in a Youtube URL as a contribution and you'll see it parse that URL into a thumbnail and link. Obviously we need to make a little "parser manager" and open this up so that people can write parsers for all sorts of web services.
Feel free to post comments, thoughts or any other feedback below.
A big thanks to
Sebastian Ă–blom and
Tom Calthrop for developing Dutch.
Enjoy free software.