The concepts for the planned sites were secret because we did not want anyoen to run out and grab all the good domain names.
We have secured a number of the desired domains, possibly even all of them now though so I am not sure why there would be any continued need to keep them secret.
On the other hand with a forum of our own on the horizon maybe this single thread is not the best place, because on our own forum each of the sites could have a thread of its own for example.
So maybe we will be able soon to start saying oh well if you want deeper information about the project join its own forum...
Re the auctions I do not think we should be offering bounties for people to go out and buy closed source software.
I think in the past there has always been free open source software a person seeking a bounty could use, if the bounty was not about actually developing new free open source software.
For example the bounty for a devcoin based business, there are oodles of free open source packages one could use to set up a commerce site, or various other kinds of business. The bounty for an exchange there was Open Transactions and there are a couple of free open source web-based exchange scripts, albeit in horrible shape but still someone could have fixed one of those up and used it.
If we have already established that there is no free open source package for the kind of auction we want, I think our first step, if we need this thing that desperately, is to get a free open source package for doing such sites developed. Once a working package to do such sites exists then we would be in a position to do a bounty for actually setting up and running such a site as a site that accepts DeVCoins, or in a position to look into hiring people to run such a site on behalf of the DeVCoin project itself, or we could create a corporation that will run it and set it up as a non-profit corporation that donates whatever would have been profit (after salaries and expenses and employer contributions to whatever employers have to contribute to and so on and so on) to the Devcoin project or something.
But first I think a free open source package one could use to achieve the bounty should exist. Otherwise people who resort to proprietary packages will have an advantage, maybe in context an "unfair" advantage, over free open source people who also would have liked to go for the bounty.
Once we start offering bounties that basically amount to "go buy that there proprietary software and use it instead of free open source software" I think we are way off track, in fact maybe directly at cross-purposes to our mission.
So I would like to suggest too that we formalise this idea somehow: do not offer any bounties other than actual development of free open source software to do a thing for the doing of a thing that no existing free open source software already does / can do.
-MarkM-
We have secured a number of the desired domains, possibly even all of them now though so I am not sure why there would be any continued need to keep them secret.
On the other hand with a forum of our own on the horizon maybe this single thread is not the best place, because on our own forum each of the sites could have a thread of its own for example.
So maybe we will be able soon to start saying oh well if you want deeper information about the project join its own forum...
Re the auctions I do not think we should be offering bounties for people to go out and buy closed source software.
I think in the past there has always been free open source software a person seeking a bounty could use, if the bounty was not about actually developing new free open source software.
For example the bounty for a devcoin based business, there are oodles of free open source packages one could use to set up a commerce site, or various other kinds of business. The bounty for an exchange there was Open Transactions and there are a couple of free open source web-based exchange scripts, albeit in horrible shape but still someone could have fixed one of those up and used it.
If we have already established that there is no free open source package for the kind of auction we want, I think our first step, if we need this thing that desperately, is to get a free open source package for doing such sites developed. Once a working package to do such sites exists then we would be in a position to do a bounty for actually setting up and running such a site as a site that accepts DeVCoins, or in a position to look into hiring people to run such a site on behalf of the DeVCoin project itself, or we could create a corporation that will run it and set it up as a non-profit corporation that donates whatever would have been profit (after salaries and expenses and employer contributions to whatever employers have to contribute to and so on and so on) to the Devcoin project or something.
But first I think a free open source package one could use to achieve the bounty should exist. Otherwise people who resort to proprietary packages will have an advantage, maybe in context an "unfair" advantage, over free open source people who also would have liked to go for the bounty.
Once we start offering bounties that basically amount to "go buy that there proprietary software and use it instead of free open source software" I think we are way off track, in fact maybe directly at cross-purposes to our mission.
So I would like to suggest too that we formalise this idea somehow: do not offer any bounties other than actual development of free open source software to do a thing for the doing of a thing that no existing free open source software already does / can do.
-MarkM-