Hi, I've been thinking about the platform decisions for P2P a little and am wondering why this system doesn't just run on top of an existing tool that does basically the same thing? Digg and Slashdot are essentially P2P-like in their functionality. Slashdot's code is open source and available (though ugly). Possibly Digg could be convinced to licensed use for this specific project (esp. b/c Omidyar supports P2P and Digg).. Here's my rationale (I'll use Digg because I think it's a slightly closer fit - Slashdot is roughly equiv..) In Digg, contributors post articles w/links and classify them within topics. Readers can subscribe (RSS) to articles according to topics. Within a topic, users can post comments & links. The value of the comments themselves are also rated by other users using a simple interface. Users themselves can be tracked by the value of their overall contributions. Comments can be "masked" to only allow the most highly rates comments to be seen - they can also be sorted by their rating.. In the P2P world, contributors would be patent holders who publish their work for community review. Readers would be domain experts who self assign to topics and get notified when new patents are posted. Comments would be expert review and discussion. Experts can rate other comments. I don't know the whole problem domain in P2P but I'm wondering why we couldn't start by using a very robust existing system and perhaps make smaller adaptions to fit our needs - rather than building something from scratch? Any input? Best, Steve
