Our goal is to develop software that allows communities to develop good ideas as a result of participating in collective identities. This software will enable participants to meet and create solutions in an environment unlike anything previously available. This environment will move us beyond the dichotomy of singular “individuals” who belong to a “group”. Essentially, with the notion of a “collective”, we seek to harmonize the individual within the group to such an extent that it will no longer make sense to speak of those “individuals” within the “group” as two separate identities. We can think of this notion of a “collective” as a “gestalt”, in so far as it is both logically and temporally prior to our designation of phenomena as an “individual” or a “group”.

What is unique to the Collective Identity Project (CIP), is that it provides a new “playground” for ideas, where anonymity is absolutely enforced. The submission, discussion, critique, rating, and pruning of ideas is to be done in a completely anonymous forum. We strongly believe that the process of discussing, solving, and creating ideas/answers/solutions desperately needs to move away from ego-driven-self-promoting goals. Only in and through a CIP (moving away from the discourse of the individual versus the individual) can we let the ideas speak for themselves. Ideally, the end result of the CIP’s response to a question or task (e.g., the CIP’s answer or solution) speaks from and yields one voice, where that one voice is equally both a “we” and a “me”.

With the above in mind, we can say that the CIP is an evolving dynamic (a work in progress). While the CIP engenders respect and openness among the participants (a respect and attraction between like minds), this does not mean, however, that there is no disagreement within the CIP. On the contrary, the very process of “working-through” an idea encourages and requires working-through differences. The CIP fosters a community of openness, respect, and collaboration all aimed at working-through differences, and working towards one and the same end/goal. We believe that the solutions or answers reached through the CIP will be good, beautiful, and harmonious ideas for the benefit of all (i.e., the entire collective). The CIP seeks the beautiful way towards the beautiful end. To put this all very playfully, we might say that our purpose in coming together as one, in and through a CIP, is to “play music” as best and as harmoniously as we can.

While the CIP shares a core concept with democracy – namely, that all may participate in forming the community voice – the CIP does not embrace the notion that everyone’s opinion counts equally. What is distinctive about the CIP is its dynamic, self-pruning ability to filter-out some dissenting voices without having to rely on a central and hierarchical judge/individual. While the naturally-occurring pruning of the CIP is made through the judgements of others within the collective, these others remain anonymous. These anonymous judgements will be made, statistically speaking, from those who spend the most time participating in the collective collaboration of ideas.

The idea that all may participate, but not everyone will continue to participate equally, is a natural result of either the participant’s lack of interest and/or a statistically higher number of those who choose to prune that dissenting voice rather than harmonize or work-through that voice. Once a voice is pruned as a dissenting or non-harmonious voice, the collective keeps a random channel open between itself and this “outsider”, which we can now call the fringe-random-voice (FRV). Indeed, the collective does not ignore the FRV altogether, but always leaves room for the possibility of a random encounter with the FRV. Each collective will leave a channel open so that the FRV signal can randomly reach any given collective identity. In this way, the FRV provides the bridge between different collectives.

In the end, the core mission of the CIP is to let the idea speak for itself!

See the Download link at the top of this page to get the source. The code is available as compressed tarballs. Alternatively, you may get the latest code base from the subversion repository.

Considering the small amount of code currently in the CVS repository, now was the right time to make the call to switch systems. Subversion will allow developers to organize and refactor the code much easier than would have been possible with CVS. You may still be able to access the CVS repository at SourceForge, but let it be known that no new code will be submitted there.

This project’s SourceForge.net Subversion repository can be checked out through SVN with the following instruction set:

svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/cidentity cidentity

Note that in order to check-in code, you must have a SourceForge account and be registered with The Collective Identity Project. Patches may be submitted by anyone.

wxWidgets lets developers create applications for Win32, Mac OS X, GTK+, X11, Motif, WinCE, and more using one codebase. It can be used from languages such as C++, Python, Perl, and C#/.NET. Unlike other cross-platform toolkits, wxWidgets applications look and feel native. This is because wxWidgets uses the platform’s own native controls rather than emulating them. It’s also extensive, free, open-source, and mature.

On top of great GUI functionality, wxWidgets gives you: online help, network programming, streams, clipboard and drag and drop, multithreading, image loading and saving in a variety of popular formats, database support, HTML viewing and printing, and much much more.

See http://wxwidgets.org/ for more information.

The major reason I had initially targeted Java was for its cross platform nature. In the end a properly designed C/C++ development can also be truly cross platform. I’ve already committed a directory structure, a little bit of code, make/configure files, and project files into the repository that supports builds under linux, unix, cygwin, and MS Windows.

For *nix platforms such as linux and cygwin gcc is the compiler of choice. For Win32 builds, I suggest using the mingw distribution of gcc. Committed in the repository are project files for the Dev-C++ IDE and Eclipse. That being said, Visual C++ will also be supported as a build environment.

I hope that those of you who have indicated interest in contributing to The Collective Identity Project will not be turned of by this change and you will still be willing to help out.