Welcome to part 1 of the OSLiving Log Book. This is a special category on Sourced that chronicles the development of the site since its inception. Piece by piece the log book will paint the picture of collaborative website building based on Open Source ethics and ideas. Part 1 in this series looks at the origins of the OSLiving site from fragments to initial development.

The original OSLiving started out in November 2007 as a simple html page listing some of the key components in the Open Source software field. The site was built as a consequence of an overflowing browser bookmark list and its purpose was to be a remotely accessible reference point – one step up from a bookmarks folder. There was no intention at that stage for it to be anything other than a series of personal references. Then one day in early December, I noticed a sudden shift on my hosting’s bandwidth readout in cpanel. Someone had submitted the page to Stumble Upon and within a few hours it had begun to spread virally. But it was met with a barrage of criticism about its lack of functionality, lack of aesthetics and lack of logic in including OSS and freeware side by side. That last point would become one of the most heated topics in the site’s short development history. More on that in the next Log Book entry.

This sudden surge interest got the blood flowing. There was clearly a demand for a new Open Source software list, particularly one that was simple and accessible, so I decided to build on it. I added categories and arranged the list into an intelligible multi-page strucutre. I began adding logo graphics and a basic summary for each piece of software and made use of an html template from Open Source Web Design.This took a week or so to construct and by then this ramshackle list actually looked like a website. I submitted the new site to digg with the hope that it would generate more interest and it did. The collective power of digg and stumble upon is astonishing to watch. It resulted in over 200 software recommendation emails, numerous offers for support and requests for involvment in the ‘project’. In the space of a few weeks OSLiving had gone from a mere list to a veritable project.

The next stage in the process was the addition of the community forums. This was partly a response to the email I was receiving by visitors interested in contributing to the site and partly a way of allowing the site to continue to evolve in as much an ‘organic’ way as possible. The forums brought me into contact with some of the people who now form the core OSLiving team. It worked as a sounding board to get critical feedback on development ideas and to steer the project in a direction that would turn this list of Open Source Software into a fully fledged archive.

In the next Log Book entry I will go into more detail on some of the key decisions that were made, including the points of contention, the ideas that sparked outrage and the working methodology that emerged as a result of collaboraion.