Dev Team About

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Mission Statement

The Developers Team's primary short and medium range goals focus on facilitating and innovating a broad scope of intelligent applications and automation tools to further enhance the functionality of the Movement's websites and related communication technology and projects. This often includes database development, general programming and custom applications for various purposes, but with a strong focus on inter-connectivity. For many projects, the approach will center around a highly modular, adjustable focus, allowing our results to be reused for a variety of team and chapter needs. Long-range goals include the development of the entire community network into the first 'intelligent social-cybernated system' prototype, where all community sites and resources are fully interconnected and as automated as we can make them, given current technology, as well as the development of a full internal & external FOSS community, where everything we develop and create is then shared freely with the rest of the world. This Team is open for anyone who wishes to contribute. This includes people who are knowledgeable in all web & program developing languages, interface experts, conceptualizers, beta testers, functionality documenters, etc. (added: --Boldhawk 15:37, 8 February 2012 (UTC))

Who are we?

The Zeitgeist Movement Developers Team is an official team of the Zeitgeist Movement. Our team consists of newbie and advanced developers alike who are interested in creating tools that contribute to the goals of the Zeitgeist Movement.

What do we do?

We assist other teams with development needs, maintain resources such as servers and applications used by the movement, and provide feedback for all things programming.

What is our role?

One of our roles is maintaining and improving the movement's current internet infrastructure. Our other role is researching and developing the movement's infrastructure of tomorrow. What we develop often incorporates existing open-source technologies and, in turn, certain technologies we develop often have uses outside of the movement and have the potential of becoming open-source projects in their own right.

Where are we now?

The Zeitgeist Movement on the internet currently consists of a growing group of websites each working in their own way to help spread awareness and coordinate the efforts of Chapters and Teams.

1. The Dev team/s is a combination of many sites. Each site, at a technological level, essentially operates within the domain of its own resources.

2. Typically we find one site, one data store, with a CMS platform as the go-between.

  • This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's often the most efficient way to get things going and is a natural first step in building an online presence.

3. This approach can lead to redundancy and isolation for example, having to sign up for a new user account on every site. A major factor why some sites become outdated quickly.

Where are we going?

We're currently making efforts to migrate into a resource-centric development paradigm. In the first stage site authors use the technology they are comfortable with, in most cases a current CMS platform. The issue with this as mentioned above is isolation.

The data model is highly coupled with the view and application logic, making it difficult - if not downright painful - to share important data across sites and apps that would benefit from data sharing.

This is where the idea of data services comes in. By providing centralized, language agnostic mechanisms ( i18n standardize localization ) for accessing data resources (think RESTful API type access/connections), we decentralize user interfaces and decouple the data layer from the presentation layer.

We would love to see sites all over the movement sharing access to common resources like user profiles, translated blog entries, forum posts, media —any data resource— while maintaining greater creative freedom and i18n localization over user interfaces. This approach requires a thoughtful balance of the " yin and yang " of resource-centric development: openness and security.


= A Vision =


We want to be open.

  • Easy to access information in 'my' language
  • Encourage idea sharing and collaborative work, regardless of skill set.
  • Empower creative individuals and foster community.

At the same time, we need to prevent abuse. By integrating authentication protocols and security mechanisms, each site can implement its own set of privileges and restrictions on usage.

  • The most important security benefit of a resource-centric approach, that no singular site's content should be able to be wiped out as a result of circumstance or a malicious act.
  • The information will be shared resources, a site/data/data object/data source can be removed without any data loss. It should be as seamless as simply installing a fresh interface and picking up where you left off OR connecting into another interface and deploying your data stream right into their data sets.

Ultimately what we're building is a safe and secure environment in which information is liquid and interfaces are lightweight. The next generation of ZM sites will have the ability to hook into movement-wide data services as much or as little as they want, leaving the community of sites as free and open as it is today, but with the option of participating in a rich, stable, and secure system for those interested in advanced implementations.

Get involved

Use the contact information in the main page: Team Contact


As work on the portal progresses we plan to integrate more directly with our project management system, currently Redmine ( http://projects.zmdev.net/ ).


Have Fun and Happy Coding !