The Belenix Community ScoopZone provides a platform to developers and enthusiasts working in or on Belenix as well as OpenSolaris to be able to share their contributions (in the form of code samples, tips, tricks, FAQs, news items, articles and reviews) with the community at large through a social information sharing system. It is meant for driving community participation on the website. A lot of people accomplishing new hacks / tricks on Belenix or OpenSolaris share their ideas/work on mailing lists and in the OpenSolaris community. People blog about the latest news about open source. People bookmark good stuff, Digg it, share it on social bookmarking sites, etc. I thought we could provide a platform for this, just like SDNShare and Netbeans Zones is, with the voting / rating system in place for motivation. This is somewhat like the way Slashdot news is published. You can say that this concept is quite similar to Slashdot, though I would rather associate it with SDNShare since that's what inspired it to be made in the first place. It will serve as great way to aggregate knowledge in one place which might otherwise get scattered.

I had initially thought about this idea when I had seen the Belenix Fanspeak Section. I am a regular user of SDNShare, Digg and the Netbeans DZone. Digg is familiar to more than half of the internet, especially the Web 2.0 Junkies. SDNShare is a Digg-like portal for contributing developer info/tech tips/samples with a built-in rating and voting system for both its content and the users who contribute. Its inspired from Digg. Similarly, there is Netbeans Dzone. And if you're geek, you probably (should) be knowing about Slashdot.

ScoopZone is powered by Drigg, which is essentially a collection of Drupal modules for making a Digg clone. I found it while looking for a compelling solution to create a knowledge sharing community for Belenix. The (new) Belenix theme has been modified and tweaked all over to adapt and support the module, and it wasn't as easy as installing any other Drupal module.

Here's the system: Any user can submit a "scoop". A scoop has to have a URL, a short description, some tags and a category. The description can be aleast X characters and upto Y characters. The current categories are: Article, Code/Script. FAQ, News Item, Tech Tip. There are 3 sections - published, upcoming and archived. On submitting a scoop, it enters into the "upcoming queue", where it waits until somebody "votes" for the scoop. Users can vote it up or down. After getting X votes it will be "promoted" to the "published" section (which is the main scoopzone page). If the scoop doesn't get a single vote in the next X hours it will move to the "archived" section. Apart from categorization (tech tips or articles, etc.) users can choose to see scoops within past 24 hours, past 7 days, etc. On the right sidebar, there are blocks for 'best upcoming scoops', 'best published scoops', 'best alltime scoops', and a tag cloud. Users can comment on scoops. Their profile picture will show with comments as well as scoops. There is an automatic member "ranking" system. Each user has a "karma", which is like a score calculated based on the number of scoops submitted, number of comments made on scoops of other users, number of votes give to other scoops, etc.

Scoops even send a pingback to the original URL. There are RSS feeds for scoops, even for categories, and lot more. Check out Drigg's features.

All inputs and suggestions on scoop categories, rules, improvements / modifications to the system and everything else are more than welcome and can be openly discussed at the belenix-discuss mailing list. You are the community, and you are the end-users. The users should decide how the system should be.