Ridesurf

The following is from a template. Your draft may need to be organized a little differently but should involve most of the elements seen below.

A brief summary of the Rideshare/Carpooling Feature proposed for CouchSurfing.com

Motivation

Many CouchSufers already hitchhike or carpool. The active CS Ridesurf group testifies to the demand for Rideshares within CouchSurfing. A CS Ridesurf feature would:

1. make the existing task of finding a ride or a passenger much easier between CouchSurfers
2. Encourage ridesharing by bringing attention to the activity and facilitating it
3. Extend the CouchSurfing experience into the voyage itself
4. Allow for a richer matrix of references, as couch surfers shared more with more people

Audience

• Couchsurfers without vehicles
• Couchsurfers with vehicles who want to
  • save gas money
  • share driving
  • or enjoy company in the car

Implementation Concepts

CouchSurfing should include a feature so that people can enter their current intermediary and end destinations (with date/time) in their profile, and folks interested in getting a ride could search for those terms. At first a simple place-name-only ridesurf organizing feature may suffice, but in the future ridesurfing features should use more intelligent geo-aware software (GIS or other maps tools), enabling software to figure out if or when a ride-offerer will be passing through a given intermediary point in their itinerary, or to help stitch together an itinerary for a traveler.

As a starting approach, we can develop a feature where, alongside the list of couches in any town, Couchsurfing.com will provide a list of rides, either arriving in that town or leaving from that town. This list will be generated from the cities people have listed as origination points and intermediary points.

Precedent services

See Survey of CarPooling services

Documents

• links to mock-ups or documents about this change

There is also a Google Group for open discussions about this feature.

Technical Steps

Step by step, what is technically necessary to make this happen?

Start a new site

• easy to create new profile on new site:
  • On CS: implement XFN
  • One-click sign up for CouchSurfers, using OpenID
• Make the CS code modular, so that there can be a common code base for the ridesurf website and CouchSurfing.

Choose a programming language/framework

Ruby/Rails

Shiny videos that gives you the "WOW I want to do it!" feeling/motivation. See http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts

Cool now.

wonderful MVC, sweet database migration functionality

no intrinsic login/authentication (but there's an OpenID Login Generator available)

Lots of developers (also a lot of "me-too" developers just following the big wave, with python there are maybe more experienced developers, not sure)

Python/Django

Presentation http://itmaurer.com/clepy/htdocs/media/presentation/presentation.html

Videos?

The free book at http://www.djangobook.com/

Python/Turbogears

2o minutes Tutorial video http://files.turbogears.org/video/20MinuteWiki2nd.mov

the video is not as shining and as convinging as the rails one, there is no scaffolding, ... uhm, not too powerful

Ruby's scaffolding is imho only useful in rapid prototyping. even when modifying a tutorial i quickly abandoned it. --- tiara

20 minutes tutorial wiki http://docs.turbogears.org/1.0/Wiki20/Page1

Python/web.py

Python/Plone

Heavy video about why plone is better than all the others http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov

Security and identity already well integrated and available

Very mature, a lot of organizations chosed it, see http://plone.org/about/sites , among which also big NGOs such as oxfam, amnesty, or FSF.org, gnu.org etc ...

Steep learning curve

Videos http://plone.org/about/movies http://plone.org/events/conferences/seattle-2006/presentations/session-videos

Plone supports openid ... http://www.openidenabled.com/software/plone

Licenses

• GNU General Public License for the software
• Creative Commons ShareAlike Attribution for all texts and graphic design

Support

I support this initiative. However, I think it should be looked at in context with the larger vision [1] of CShares.

Interested developers

• phauly^TalkCS
• Aaron Antrim - limited but growing PHP skills, extensive HTML background
• Guaka^CS
• Morgan Tocker
• Joe Edelman
• PIETERTJE
• tiara
• Bru^TalkCS
• Dominic Ng - been admining lately but eager to brush up on programming
• (add yourself here if interested)