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Django Cairn - A collection of Django knowledge

First, I want to say I love djangopackages.com. I direct people to it all the time! It provides breakdowns on a variety of Django related packages. I struggle to keep up with all the new libraries folks are building or have built, but the site helps me discover them.

Similarly, our community has a lot of published knowledge on the web. If we consider DjangoCon talks alone, there’s hundreds of videos out there. I would benefit immensely from having a categorized collection of those videos. Mix in all the blogs, podcasts, release notes and gists, we’d have a mighty library of knowledge nuggets.

Enter Django Cairn. The passive trail guide for a Djangonaut’s journey.

A Cairn on the desert above the Colorado river. Photo by nico from unsplash.

My goal is to create a site to direct Djangonauts to that knowledge. The site won’t host the content. Instead, it’ll be an index for information everywhere else on the web. It will exist as a facilitator to existing sites and blogs.

Ideally the content will have existing categorical tags, but I suspect some additional curation will be beneficial.

I feel like an easy thing to start with is all the past DjangoCon talks and tutorials. The previous years’ conference sites are still up which should make it easy enough to track down the content. The next area would be identifying folks and organizations that publish blogs that have RSS feeds or similar. Other areas that would be great to include:

I believe this can be successful in our community for these reasons:

  1. It provides a research center to compliment discovery via the Django Newsletter.
  2. It encourages Django specific content creators by providing another marketing channel.
  3. The purpose is simple, catalog existing content into a single repository.

These are some of the difficulties I anticipate:

  1. Finding and adding new content sources.
  2. Content being out of date.
  3. What threshold does the content need to meet?
  4. If there is curation or subjective opinions included, what is considered fair?

The next steps:

  1. Collect initial static content links, titles and descriptions.
  2. Categorize content.
  3. Determine UX and UI.
  4. Determine data model.
  5. Implement views and templates.
  6. <deployment shenanigans>
  7. Research RSS ingestion solution.
  8. Research content review solution.
  9. <draw rest of owl>

Interested in contributing? Make your way to the repo django-cairn.