Giving people the tools they need to share knowledge and advance open society through social software.

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We are a network of people that have come together to give you the tools you need to share knowledge and advance open digital society.

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Why 'Barnraiser'?

Barn logoWhen an Amish family needs a new barn their community gathers to build a barn in a single day, a tradition called barn raising. In building a barn together in a day they achieve something that no single family can do.

We share that spirit as we build for society.

  • I wanted to find a simple RSS feed aggregation tool that allows people to add RSS and ATOM feeds to a social tool that would aggregate them into a simple web page for a workshop I was running.

    SIDA (Swedish International development agency) asked me to run the workshop for 90 youth that they were about to send abroad to gain work experience from the developing world. I wanted them to blog and I wanted a way to aggregate those blogs into a single web page so that they could easily keep in touch with each others news and hopefully learn from each others experiences.

    I could not find a script so I wrote a script that I have codenamed "bank". It looks up RSS and ATOM feeds from web pages (like blog pages), pulls out the latest entry and stores it. The stored entries are displayed on a web page.

    I could easily add an RSS feed from the webpage so that you can get a single feed from a wide variety of sources.

    Adding a login function would allow people to add feeds, hence you have a social aggregation tool.

    You can find an example at http://bank.src.barnraiser.net... which updates every 15 minutes. What do you think? Good idea? Shall I develop it and open source it or should I put it in the bin?

    Tom

Free social software

  • Dutch
    Share information quickly and easily with Dutch; our knowledge sharing network tool.
  • Roundhouse
    Import blog entries from the whole blogsphere into your blog stream with Roundhouse; our social blogging tool.
  • Prairie
    Forget all those different username and password combinations once and for all with Prairie; our Internet identity server.
  • AROUNDMe
    A collaborative networking suite.

Highlights