Assignment: Spend time on Github, looking at how the design of your site and the behavior of the users interacts. Come to class with three observations about interesting or surprising behavior on the site.
Landing page for Github is the News Feed: shows social activity (i.e. following, forking), updates to organizations you belong to (i.e. if someone pushed new code to a shared repository). Find myself drawn to click on other people’s profiles and look at the code they’ve pushed, to see what they’ve been working on.
Site design and UI doesn’t seem to encourage direct communication between users (i.e. public/private messaging). Main way to interact is by forking, pushing, sending pull requests, writing about “Issues” within specific repositories. // Specifics of that functionality (fork, push, pull…) are obscure for non-technical users, although the site describe itself as technical “Build software better, together.”
Communication simplified to interactions related to coding and version control, which is at the heart of Github. Social interactions truly boil down to these two main aspects of Github. Calls itself “social coding”.
Focus is on profile pages, which have every person’s repositories, updates, etc. “Social” aspect is front-and-center but the social interactions seem almost non-existent. The meat of these interactions (editing code, forking, pushing, pulling) happens off-site, or takes the users off-site. Seems a little disjointed.
Github gets rid of the need to meet by allowing for collaboration on the user's time.
There are ways in which people can send comments to each other about certain commits, which is a good way to collaborate on smaller tasks.
Interesting uses beyond code:
Shared doc editing
If it wanted to beyond code for a larger audience, adding more customizable options for changing the syntax or how it works, could take people away from the idea that this is just for the software developer community.
Clays Shirky How the internet will.... http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government.html