• 1 Primary Goals
  • 1.1 activate people
  • 1.2 keep it real
  • 1.3 make things usable
  • 1.4 ensure source code can be used as prior art
  • 1.5 locate relevant electronically published source code
  • 1.6 "tagging" system
  • 1.7 additional goals
  • 1.8 related projects

• Find a more appropriate logo
  • The “people being shown a presentation” logo is nice, but probably not what we want to use forever. If anyone can create a logo (and license it to us for our possible use as our trademark), we could use it.
  • Perhaps incorporate a lightbulb, which is what the USPTO uses as their favicon?
• Understand community motivations
  • Add motivations to the Motivations page.
• write about us in your blog

• Understand USPTO motivations
  • Add motivations to the Motivations page.
• stick to existing classifications schemes for computers and computer software

• Define “use-cases”
  • “software developer” use-case
  • “software user” use-case
  • “USPTO examiner” use-case
    • What are the steps taken during a examination?
• Build a “tagging” prototype
  • What would a “tagging wizard” look like?
  • What would the container look like? (probably XML RDF)
  • Break tags into “system”, “component”, “algo” areas

From the official website: Establishing electronic publication practices that any software author can use to ensure their source code can be used as prior art.

Timestamping can give the evidence that some source code already existed at some given date. So we need to give evidence that such source code also has been publicly available at that date. The project prevalent.de already offers applications for timestamping. A simple idea might be to run them on the whole of sourceforge every night. But then: How do we store the timestamps in a secure way, usable in court?

From the official webiste: Creating search mechanisms and interfaces that allow patent examiners and others to more easily locate relevant electronically published source code and its related documentation.

• I don't know. How do they do it with all the millions of books an magazines? Probably they just grant it and wait for objections? So we could write those?

Also from the official website: Developing a “taxonomy” or “tagging” system that can be used by software developers, patent examiners and others to describe and help locate relevant source code and documentation.

• This sounds like categorisation of software .. well, maybe just make the USPTO to offer free discussions about recently published patent-applications on their own website and encourage the community to post all evidences they know?

• Add historical computer hardware/software information to Wikipedia. There is a -lot- of stuff that happened in the 50s and 60s, and even in the 70s and 80s, that is very difficult to find. (For example, some compilers, garbage collectors, and demand-paged operating systems were created in the 50s.)
• Convince organizations to publish old software, manuals, and technical reports.

here we might find useful ideas for our project:

• prevalent.de Software-Patent search, rating, prior-art database, community objection writing and free timestamping
• Prior-Art Database prototype appears to be in its infancy, but includes some timestamping capability.
• Search Patents Use the free Guest account to search the GetThePatent.com worldwide patent database for prior art.