In February, the OpenCalais project was slashdotted because it had opened a bounty on a WordPress plug-in to produce RDF formatted version of blog posts. The project sounded interesting, and my previous semantic web project had just stalled. The specification was very loose, so I assumed that they were expecting a simple alpha that could be expanded on. So, I signed up for the project and began hacking away at a simple plugin. I spent a couple hours on it and stopped. I realized I wouldn’t be able to work on it for several days and by that time my entry would be lost. I was expecting OpenCalais to be inundated with so many entries from the slashdot community they would close the submissions in 48 hours. Boy was I wrong.
I checked back few weeks later expecting to see the completed entry available for download. I wanted to see how the finished version compared with my approach. Instead I found this:
Unfortunately - and unexpectedly - we haven’t seen any reasonable applications for the bounty process so we’ll most likely be contracting for the development of the WordPress plugin.
They hadn’t seen any reasonable applications? Was I wrong about them getting hundreds of applications from the unwashed masses of slashdot? Did I still have a chance at getting the prize? The deadline or the submissions was the next day (Saturday) and all I had was a little bit of very raw code. I spent my Saturday morning building my submission and writing up my proposal for what I would do with my entry. A demo plugin was not mentioned in the proposal request, but I included my basic plugin anyway. I thought it may let me stand out of the crowd a little. So, I submitted a proposal to the OpenCalais bounty project a few hours before the deadline.
The winner was to be announced in 10 days, so I waited. And waited. There was nothing on the boards and not even an email response confirming my submission had been received. Finally, I emailed them and they replied with a link to a new post on their boards.
Bounty Update
Over the last week or so we’ve been thinking hard about what to do with the WordPress bounty. Here’s the situation:
We received a number of proposals of varying quality at the very last minute - from three sentences long to reasonably well articulated. We’ve read each one carefully and evaluated them for how innovative they were and how experienced the proposer was in developing production strength WordPress plugins. While we appreciate the effort the individuals made in putting these proposals together, the fact of the matter is that none of them had the combination of great ideas and great experience that we were looking for.
So, we’ve decided to to down another path. We feel badly about it - but we feel strongly that its the right thing to do.
So, our apologies if you had your hopes up. Our thanks for taking the time to apply. There will be contest opportunities in the near future that will be contests - not bounties.
Comments, criticism and suggestions welcome,
Regards
I was horribly disappointed. Not because my proposal wasn’t chosen, but because they just shot themselves in the foot. The point of a bounty is to draw attention to your project and get people interested in using your service and building add-ons. The initial proposal is not the finished product. All the people that submitted proposals could have been an army of developers combining their ideas into a fantastic product in true OpenSource fashion, but instead they’ve been alienated. All OpenCalais needed to do was choose the person with the most extensible architecture and allow them to wrangle the rest of the developers as the benevolent dictator. In a few months, they’d have a product they could be proud of.
Now, I have a bit of code without a home and I really hate that. There isn’t a project somewhere that I can check out and maybe add some of my ideas to. I’ve found some of the other OpenCalais submitters on the web, but without a single point of contact or the endorsement of the parent project I doubt they’ll go very far.
OpenCalais just joined Duke Nukem Forever. Cheers!