Consider a forum system

[Richard Gomes]

http://www.phpbb.com/

* supports LDAP http://www.phpbb.com/support/documentation/3.0/adminguide/acp_general.php#acp_client_auth

* supports OpenID http://zenorsoft.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=841

* supports Postgres

[Dominik Holenstein (holdom)]

Idea: What about testing Google Wave?

[Richard Gomes (frgomes)]

Google Wave is (I'd say) a redressed/integrated email+IRC client, which allows instantaneous updates in the UI and integration with desktop applications thru HTML5 APIs. Most of these tecnologies are still under development or not standardized yet.

In spite there are clear similarities between a forum system and the way Google Wave organize information, I see that there are 2 big problems:

1. We cannot host it ourselves in our own infrastructure;
2. It's still a very incipient technology.

I think (1) is the big problem. It certainly is not a problem for the end user or the home user, but it may be a threat for companies and even relatively small projects like us. The reason is that you become needlessly dependent on someone else's infrastructure (authentication, mainly) in order to keep your services running. The threat is that "someone else" is free to charge you for authentication, web hosting, backup services, etc whenever they decide to. "Someone else" can change the policy the entire thing works, can change the service level aggreement everything works, etc.

I would be happy to have something pretty similar to Google Wave, but open source and hosted in our own servers, administered by ourselves, under our own interests and priorities.

Note I'm including OpenID as a requirement for services we provide. OpenID ultimately allows one to use our services without having to open an account with us, keeping only their existing Yahoo account or their existing Google account :)

[Richard Gomes (frgomes)]

Kicking to v0.1.4