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[tibellus]

Is someone interested in cooperating with me on a recently open website? I really need someone who's good at programming. The site will try to be a community of creatives all around the world: artists, designer, play-writers, editors, etc. If is something creative, that has some revolutionary thinking included, then that's the material I try to add on the website!
Please, if you read this, at least leave a reply!

[JakobD]

Is this an Open Source project?

I'm not sure what the aim is. Can you flesh out the plan in more detail and explain how it relates to OS? Then I might be able to say whether I'm interested and if not then perhaps refer you to someone who might be.

Cheers.

[tibellus]

The aim is in creating a community of all types of creatives, with some "mentors" to give guidance to new members... Is related to open source because the users must respect a condition: they must use open source tools for creating their work.

The ideas are still wondering around in my head, that's why I need some advices, to fixate them somewhere.

[NotSure]

Well some of the questions I would ask would be...

1. Does this need to be on FOSS OS as well as software?
2. What happens when there is little to no FOSS for a specific job?
3. Can it be freeware, or cheap alternative shareware/commercial?

With question 2, it is not hard to figure out that many artists use Photoshop over The GIMP. There is a reason for this. The GIMP is very frustrating to use for artists. Every action is slow because the tools are not set up. Yes, it is possible to create art with The GIMP, but there are artists who paint in their own faeces. You can create art with anything, but some things have always been easier to create art with... like a paint and brush combo. The GIMP has tools that are easy to use like the Histogram. Most artists will not touch a histogram. It is one of many photography tools The GIMP has that are easy to access and use, that are also pretty useless for most art jobs.

With question 3 there are many good shareware and cheap commercial paint programs. Dogwaffle comes to mind. I would not recommend it for advanced users, but it will take you a long way for a cheap program.

I know this seems counterproductive to the idea of FOSS art community, and I do not know much about the audio tools, but there really is very little to pick through for creating art in FOSS at this point. There is Cinepaint, but it is far from a full set of tools at this time. This is why I am trying to get another art program project off the ground. If there were a program out there now, that had 60% of the tools I need on a daily basis, I wold be using it today. Well it would also have to be easier to work with than your average nuclear power plant. I have enough feedback from other artists that GNU-Linux is not the artists platform today, because there are just no tools for us.

[davidryder]

I had a friend that was talking about something similar to this. It would have been a social gathering point for artists to publish their art (any form) anonymously and allow other people to view their work for free. It would be a way for artists to get out there without worrying about the weight of hype of names.

For whatever reason the idea just fizzled out. I would definitely be interested in seeing something like this develop.

[lm8]

As far as a web site solution for written works, there's already an Open Source project in the works.  It's at http://transformativeworks.org/projects/archive.html  Maybe you can check into sharing code with them.

I'd certainly be interested in a web site project to host written as well as art related works.  However, I'd like to see it offer different or better features than what's already out there.  I program too, so I could certainly help with code for such a site.  I think I'd like to see the code more structured, compact, reuseable and better documented than the average code that's already out there for this sort of thing.  Otherwise, a project like this could quickly turn into reinventing the wheel and a large waste of time.  If someone's already done something similar and you can add a few changes to make it work, starting from scratch doesn't make much sense unless you intend to do it in a much better way.

I think the issue of good Open Source tools for creating the works is separate from the issue of Open Source projects to allow hosting of the works.  Also, what tools an artist/writer prefers is going to be a highly individual preference.  While some will be perfectly happy with Open Source tools available, others won't.  One post mentioned gimp and cinepaint.  There are other Open Source graphics programs out there.  They probably won't appeal to everyone, but do appeal to some.  A few of the other Open Source options include mtpaint, I.mage, Imagemagick/Graphicsmagick, Tuxpaint.  For vector graphics, you can check into sodipodi, inkscape, winfig (Windows), figurine (Linux).  If you run a search on the Internet or Sourceforge, you'll find many others.

[lm8]

One thing I'd like to see which I haven't run across very often is a way to intelligently search for certain types of creative works and share links to those works.  It would allow for a larger collection of artistic works than what's merely at one web site.  Artists could add links and descriptions to their works no matter what site it was hosted on.  There'd have to be logic to allow users or moderators to maintain the links and remove invalid ones.  Would be nice if there was a feature where the search mechanism could recommend similar works you might like based on ones you do like.  I've seen this sort of thing done for music or books, but haven't seen it done for artwork and writing shared on the web yet.  Would be interested to hear if anyone knows of any examples of this already available out there.

[tibellus]

Okay, so what would you do with this site? I am really interested in collaborating, maybe we could create something great together. I need some more ideas.

[OSLiving]

@lm8 that's an interesting point. Something I'm constantly on the lookout for is a decent and well used arts & humanities content aggregator. But something that's informative and respected rather than being a dump site for trashy entertainment news, celeb gossip etc. I'm thinking about a site dedicated to art and culture. It seems to me the arts and humanities always get brushed aside under the weight of tech and science topics.