★ NILM Bugs joins the PeoplePods family

Well this is pretty nifty! Carl Malamud (Wikipedia, Twitter) and Karl Fogel (he created Subversion!) have taken the open source version of MediaBugs and turned it into a bug tracker about the availability of legal materials.

Says Carl, in his blog post for O'Reilly Radar,

The legal bug tracker is a classic open source story. We started with the Media Bugs code base developed by Scott Rosenberg and his team, the winners of a Knight News Challenge award. Media Bugs, in turn, is built on an open source toolkit called PeoplePods.

Says Karl, in his blog post about the project,

Usually people address customized bug tracking needs in one of two ways: they make do with some existing tracker (e.g., filing non-software bugs in one of the many free software bug trackers), or they spend a lot of time and effort building a bug tracker from scratch or near-scratch. Neither solution is entirely satisfactory...This code base has the potential to drastically lower the cost of making a customized tracker.

We are excited to see PeoplePods powering another site, and grateful for Karl and Carl's contributions to the core project.

Get in touch if you'd like to help out with the NILM Bugs project. If you'd like to set up your own clone of MediaBugs or contribute to that project, check out the code here, and it will automagically install the latest version of PeoplePods for you!.

- Ben Brown, Dec 14, 2010