Are you interested in finding people to hang out with and work on projects together? What about doing this online? We're starting an online group for hanging out online and working on projects, called POSI. POSI stands for POSI Open Source Initiative. There are a lot of open source projects that collaborate online. But POSI is different. We have programming marathons, but they are competitions.

First, we elicit from people their goals, interests, and abilities. Their goals are recorded into a large system which stores the goals of all the members of the group, including relationships between goals, such as depends, helps or subgoal.

People then join existing projects of the group or propose new ones. Projects are just sets of goals. The same goal however may belong to many projects.

Anyone can create a new goal, and indeed we recommend that you create thousands of them. When new goals are created, the system checks to make sure that the particular goal is not already in the system. If it is, it records that you are also interested in the completion of that goal.

Then foreach goal the system determines the value to the group for completing it. For instance if there is a critical goal, which is depended on by many projects, it receives a higher value. Value is determined solely by how much you enable the entire groups goals.

The POSI software knows which goals you have, which subjects you are interested in, and what skills you have. It then helps people split into teams to work towards projects that they are interested in and have the required skills to complete. (If there are people that don't work well together, it can take that into consideration.)

So for instance, suppose many people wanted linux packages of a large vocabulary speaker independent speech recognition system that actually worked. The group that had the skills to do this and completed this task would be rewarded heavily.

The competition consists of these various teams trying to solve their goals totaling the most amount of points.

POSI aims not only to motivate people to work together to solve their goals. The end result of the competition is hopefully that many popular and important goals have been solved to the benefit of the group.

Right now we're trying to get the basic infrastructure and heartbeat going. Please don't lose interest if its slow at first.

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