A few people have asked me about what is happening next with Carbon Co-op. The short answer is that I have no idea. I had never heard of it before Saturday and I am not very personally invested in it. Probably the best thing to do if you are interested in the future of the business idea is follow the founder on Twitter and ask him.

Now as far as the code that is posted on Launchpad is concerned. I’m going to leave the Sicamp branch exactly as it was when I pushed at 2pm on Sunday. That’s where we go to.

I don’t really like the thought of it but I am tempted to do a screencast to explain the design of the app and show the site and basically all the stuff that wasn’t included in the actually SiCamp presentation. We did a lot of work! We should have shown it!

In terms of the trunk branch I have a few technical questions left of Django that I might use the project to experiment on. These are:

• Markdown support in descriptions
• AJAX support
• Using MySql in the deployed mod_python version (with that done I could open up the app with the understanding it doesn’t do anything).
• Introducing mocked testing as you would do for a Rails app and off the back of this some refactoring of the views section
• Replace the Django Template Loader with the Jinja2 equivalent

In terms of the domain problems we set out to solve on the weekend itself, there are two that didn’t get resolved. Firstly there is the Locality issue: who is near who. For the weekend I was going to simply hack it that if the first segment of the post code was the same then those people counted as being in the same area. I’d like to do something more elegant and in depth but that’s another post.

Secondly there is the “ratcheting” idea that was kind of fundamental but I’m not sure really got highlighted in the pitch. The idea is that the app should always be exhorting you to get more people to join and giving you milestones to go for. This means once you have identified all the people in a Locality you need to figure what Actions they are taking and how many people in each Locality are Devoted to the Action.

You then need to see if the Action has Tiers with higher Thresholds and tell the user to try and get their friends and neighbours to commit to the next Tier.

Once you have all the numbers of Ongoing Actions, Devotees and people in the Locality you can then start doing some awesome stuff like altering the postion of the Actions to promote Actions that are close to crossing the next Threshold and so on.

If all that doesn’t make sense then don’t worry because I probably need to explain the design somewhere.