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The Create Project: Ambiently Sharing Creativity

This is an outline for a paper for blendercon 2005, but outlines what the create project is all about.

Creative Free and Open Source projects such as Blender, CinePaint, GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, Audacity, Open Clip Art Library and others are highly successful projects which produce much video, audio, illustrations, photos, and other content. However, much code, media, and infrastructure are produced by each project somewhat independently which could be shared inter-project. For example, several of the aforementioned applications have their own brush types, color preferences, preferred media storage locations, keyboard shortcuts and file format converters. Sharing these resources saves developer time, increases productivity, and contributes to an overall improved user experience. Because of this overlap and the similarity of media, there is need to work together on standards, promotions, and inter-community plans.

This paper is about the Create Project and how it catalyzes communication and sharing between Free and Open Source “creative software” communities by providing a third-party space for shared infrastructure. This talk outlines the rationale for this project, its current state, who is participating, and future plans.

Particular emphasis is placed upon the strategy of improving communication through ambient sharing. This is typified by combining developers’ blogs from the different development communities into a planet-type blog aggregation available at Create project space at Freedesktop.org. In the commercial world, affiliations and alliances are brokered through contracts and funding. In Free and Open Source Software alternate approaches for encouraging collaboration and sharing are necessary which do not rely upon forced meetings, ultimatums, and explicit timetables that decrease the fun in development. Rather, the emphasis on ambient sharing is about providing a service for sharing, lowering social barriers for participation, and making collaboration casual.