Opentution

This is the first release of the source code for the Opentution project. I am using Django as the web development framework because it eases web development a lot and with python it has got a well established development language beneath it. The release is still very basic but I hope it will be a good starting point for further development. To take away a lot of the development work I am including the Pinax project which can be understood as a database of social apps for Django. This project is also in the early stages but it looks very promising.

With the url www.opentution.org you still find the old page written in static html. The reason is that I was first looking for a provider that is supporting ruby on rails but later changed my mind and decided to use django. Now I am at the situation that I can not upload and show the current status because the provider does not support django natively. Only if I do an upgrade, which includes spending quite a lot of money, it is possible to run the page on the server. This means I am looking for another solution now.

Enough talking. Here is the source code: http://devel.opentution.org/.
Additionally you also have to download the source code from the Pinax project and copy it into your project folder. The rest of the info can be found in the INSTALL file included in the source code. Have fun with it!

What was done until now:

• framework written in django
• registration and login
• switch language between english and german
• basic profile for a user

Next steps:

• setting up a basic database model
• form for starting a new article

Welcome to my weblog about the Opentution project! In the following entries I will describe the process and ideas about the project.

First of all what is it about and how did it start?

The basic idea came from reading the comments in newspapers and forums targeting the political system. Everybody just complained and said that politics is rubbish and the politicians are useless. This was not my opinion but realised that there was not really a possibility to improve the situation. One could only complain or eventually make a statement at sites from the government on already nearly released laws. But nothing to start a law without having it preformed from political parties and lobbyists. So here came the idea. Take principles from open source and use them for the government. All that breaks down in having someone working on an article by including comments from others and finally find the best solution by starting a poll on the topic. The difference to usual open source projects when writing code is that finally one person decides if the code gets into the tree or not. For a law not one person but in an ideal form the people as the sovereign should decide. So lets find out if this way of direct democracy is possible and brings a better solution as the current political system.