About

TapBot is an open source project to supply story tellers with everything they need to create real time narrative story in virtual worlds - to create immersive story.

That’s the Big Hairy Audacious Goal (”BHAG”). Of course a BHAG also has a 10-to-30-year timeline.

An experiment in open source development itself

That said, TapBot is also an open source project with no code and no developers. In the book Cathedral and Bazaar, Eric Raymond outlines necessary preconditions for an open source project, one being code. So more specifically TapBot is an experiment in open source development itself - to build a community, define a vision, flesh out requirements, and then code. To that end we’ll experiment with this blog and multiple community tools, like BuddyPress, to try and kick start TapBot.

It’s still early but worth getting started

Still it’s very early - virtual worlds nascent and it’s unclear what real time narrative actually looks like. So there is a lot of work to be done before coding starts. I’ve already met many people through my blog, meetups, and conferences who are very interested in immersive story. Pulling them together can only accelerate development.

High level project goals

In addition to the BHAG it’s always nice to start with some high level goals.

• Enable the artist to experiment and monetize their work - Let the artists do the experimenting and build in revenue generating opportunities so they can continue to experiment.
• Tap into the collective intelligence available on the internet - Use collective intelligence from the internet to extend capabilities of artists and their work.
• Follow the small pieces loosely joined model - As Tim O’Reilly defined in his post, MicroHoo: corporate penis envy?, “there is another model, represented by both Linux and the Internet, that might be called small pieces loosely joined. (I don’t use the term in quite the same way as in David Weinberger’s eponymous book (linked just previously), but the phrase is just too right to ignore.) The Unix philosophy, laid out so brilliantly in The Unix Programming Environment, is of a network of cooperating tools, each doing one thing well.”
• Enable creative assets to be portable and extensible - If an artist wishes to open their creative work to the public to modify and extend, so bid.

Who am I?

l, Justin Gibbs, am a Senior Product Manager at Vivaty. There was a time when I pursued becoming a screenwriter, of course I failed. But I learned a lot and seeing virtual worlds I saw a new medium for narrative storytelling.