This is a nice idea. However, is this kind of community project board not already being provided by the likes of Sourceforge and Freshmeat? These sites are already up and running for your projects, and provide all the administrative tools (CVS, bug reporting, etc.) that a programming project needs.

I would not be opposed to PM setting up a project board, and I would probably use it if it were there, but I think that it would require quite some effort both in administration, and in getting it set up in the first place.

My $0.02 --rW

Another idea would be to use those resources (like sourceforge) to create a project area for Perlmonks and/or the Everything engine. I know I started working on some stuff almost a year ago, and then I was blind-sided by the drop in contract earnings. I have had to stop almost all of my outside efforts so I can put food on the table, save for college, etc. It would have been nice to have my stuff on a development site somewhere to be picked up by someone else. (I could have, should have, but didn't) As life gets normalized again in the next 18 months (recovery please), I will start contributing again.

A purely Perl board would be nice, since it would be in Perl. It would provide a centralized location for examples of coding in Perl. It would provide a centralized location for peer reviews. We might decide to do things differently here (yeah reinventing a slightly different wheel). Maybe our gracious host could get some income to help pay for the expenses out of it (or even a well earned supplement to his current income.) If done with the everything engine, then this entire site could be integrated with projects.

I think this actually heads back to the Professionalism in Perl issue. A project board could also be used to teach less guru-ish programmers how to properly participate in a project. That in and of itself might be the biggest reason of all.

I would be glad to pitch in a few hours a week. (Sorry, all I have to spare at 80+ hours per week work).

I think this is an idea worth considering. Of course there are tools like sourceforge where it is almost an ideal place to host an open source project and apprentice.perl.org where you can also join Perl specific projects.

However there are also drawbacks: the projects currently hosted on apprentice.perl.org are few and they seemed pretty complicated (well, at least for me... I am also looking for a project that I could give a hand and learn something new at the same time). Sourceforge is a nice place but I do not feel the community feeling that I feel here (of course Perlmonks.org is a lot smaller than sourceforge AFAIK).

Incorporating CVS and mailing lists and what-not in everydevel engine is probably quite difficult (or at least would take a significant coding time), so if there are any projects emergging from Perlmonks users, they should probably hosted somewhere else like on sourceforge, however, a message in the Announcements section I think would be appropriate. One could also keep us all posted about the progress of the project by posting in Perlmonks (either in Announcement section if it is about to announce a new release or in Meditations if it would be asking for feedback or in SoPW if it was concerning a Perl problem). If the number of these projects grow, a special node could be made listing them all and providing some background information.

Just a thought.