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This is my favorite feature yet: leveling up animations! As users express their opinions via Quick Rate and other Do Good Quick areas of bilumi.org, Munin drops pebbles into a water bottle. Contributors can watch the water level rise with every pebble until they reach the next level… and Munin takes a drink! (more…)

We just rolled out a pretty neat feature: anonymous users can now rate, evaluate and write reviews in the Do Good Quick part of our site. Their contributions are only saved when they login or register. Screen shot below: (more…)

We are proud to announce the next release of the bilumi platform and website. Have a look and let us know what you think! (more…)

Check out the new demo we built for AccountAbility, a project led by Nate Greenslit at the MIT Media Lab. AccountAbility aims to put socially responsible information on online bank statements.
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The dev flock just whipped out our first external web API, bringing BILUMI closer to expanding how and where people get information. Try it!

Why is this cool? Now it is easier to mash BILUMI data with other data. Mashups can lead to insights and utility not available to a narrow data view. Plus, they’re hella fun.

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Want to get product and company information while in the store? Text message a barcode, eg 18675309, to

score@bilumi.org

to find out what our database has to say.

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I presented an overview of the technology to Ignite Boston 3. The best part was engaging with the crowd. People laughed at the Willy Wonka example, cheered when I said we were an an open source non-profit, and congratulated me afterwards on a great presentation.

Click the >> arrows below the following image frame to page through the presentation.

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Check out our new project manager. Username and password are both “guest” in lower case. Learn more about agile programming and the scrum methodology. It’s not just for programmers.

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Today was the first of our every-other-week Sunday Jam sessions. These will serve both as informal work sessions and informal planning and presentation meetings. Formally, they are an excuse for the team to hang out and eat dinner together. Clay takes his Chef title as seriously as one might expect.

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I redesigned the front-end of the coop bills system (nothing to do with ThoughtAndMemory other than web dev skills). I am not a great front-end programmer, but it is nonetheless satisfying to find an appropriately sized project and do a good job. Javascript and ajax are starting to make sense.

The back-end is bulking up considerably (tags, API, solr faceted navigation) and the front-end is being improved to show all these features. Dan and Eggar continue to impress.

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Dan and Eggar worked diligently right up to the last minute to get the site in order for the festival. Chia, a peer from MIT and friend of Marcos and Sam, joined the team in the fall, too, and did great work getting the volunteer packet together. It turned out that laptops are hard to read on sunny days, and people are not too interested in entering data at festivals, either. The kids liked our commercial, though. Talking to people was valuable for general feedback, though, as well as being kind of fun.

For the competition kick-off I fixed up some documentation on the wiki and put together a presentation to ramp up the contestants…er, contestant. Gus donated Toscanini ice cream for the cause. Oh, but that is not even the best part! Best of all, we picked up a solid frontend contributor. A friend of Clay’s, Eggar, is volunteering his professional web skills to give our prototype a real layout and user interface. Since he was the only person to actually fulfill the competition’s aims, we selected him as our winner. Having the backend and frontend covered by two great workers is a load off my shoulders. The prototype took longer than my original estimate of a couple months, but now we are really rocking.

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Check out the dev flock’s open source trac dev nest.. Use the dev nest to find out more about the design and implementation of our system, track our progress against milestones, report bugs and request features in our soon-to-be released prototype.

I’m getting the hang of installing software: configure, make, make install. Break a few things, google a few things, break different things. Figure out each problem along the way until it is finally put back together. It is not so different than debugging someone else’s code.

Installing trac with the right build of subversion and apache took a full day’s work. Having a repo browser is great, and I like the new wiki layout. Welcome to the trac wiki!

An MIT student, taking time of from MIT, received the competition announcement and wrote back enthusiastically. His name is Dan, and he is currently living in Baltimore looking for work. He had been thinking of doing something similar for rating politicians, and is passionate about building the technology. Already he is improving our database models.

I turned in my thesis on Friday and started work on Monday. Clay quit his Student Art Association job to work on HuginMunin full time. We got a dog. We drove all over visiting different pounds. At one of them there was a dog so big that when a little kid walked by he said, “Look, Daddy, a cow!” Many dogs are named after bears, or even just Bear, so when we saw our Bear we were already calling him Little to distinguish him from the others. It was love at first sniff.

A friend from work, Sean, is consulting on integrating a small text search module into the code. He joined Endeca a month before I did, and is also fresh out of college.

We checked out Ignite Boston last Tuesday. The first talk was about Processing, which we used in our Infomercial. Traer physics and animation libraries are especially awesome.

My favorite was the wiki-like programming contest. It is a competition where the entries are open source. It is useful to iteratively submit entires to receive feedback on one’s algorithm, but then other teams can make use of your insights. Sounds fun, not least of all because everyone is working together in the big picture, while still vying for short-term breakthroughs.

Sam and Ale are going back to school, and Luke is busy with other work. Marcos, not a committed member, but still a useful consultant, is leaving for RISD in a few days. HuginMunin has a commitment to demo our application at the Somerville food and arts festival October 10th. The prototype needs another iteration of work fast, so Clay and I are looking for more volunteers. What about you? In case that falls through we are holding a ‘make-a-cool-frontend’ competition at the end of September. The winner gets an Ipod.

Today was the last dev team meeting. We presented to ourselves our accomplishments. Ale showed off the web app, Sam the cellphone proof of concept, Peddie the firefox extension he consulted on, Clay the front end design proposals and I the graph modules.

I wish I could have showed off how much we all learned, both technically about web dev, as well as in understanding what we are building. We are making a new kind of collaborative software, like a wiki, but with tools for helping the group decide the trustworthiness of each contribution. Controversial information is distilled into quantifiable numbers, efficient for SMS and powerful for third party applications. We’ve done good.