We are looking for some help creating data analysis and visualization tools for the new Roundware upgrades we have been madly working on for the Smithsonian.  If you are a front-end web developer with some experience in analyzing and displaying data in useful, beautiful and creative ways, please get in touch!

Here are some details:

• Roundware is open-source so much of your work will be distributed as such
• because it is open-source, we want to use open and free tools as much as possible
• among others, we’ll be using: html5, jquery, ajax, javascript, django, php, python, mysql
• technical skills are important, but Roundware has it’s origins in art and music, so we are hoping to find developers who bring their own design ideas (aesthetic and functional) to the project
• the budget is for project-by-project contract work, starting fairly small and growing as needed

We collect a ton of information (all anonymous, of course) about how people use Roundware and the Smithsonian has particular interest in being able to look at the data in meaningful ways.  As “America’s Institution”, they are always trying to better understand how the public interacts with them so that they can improve their offerings.

Here are some projects that use Roundware for your reference:

• Stories from Main Street: app | website
• Mountain Ghosts: app | info | video
• Scapes: app | info | review

We recently procured roundware.com and though we have no plans to use it in the near future (it points back to roundware.org for now), we are happy to have it off the market and under our control.  We tried to get it when we obtained roundware.org, but it was owned by someone else, and it turns out, not surprisingly, that the someone else was a domain aggregator.

Thankfully, the knowledge that no one else in their right minds would ever want roundware.com gave us the confidence to be very strict in the negotiations.  So we got it with funds commensurate with an open-source artistic software project.  Perhaps in the future we will use it to offer a hosted Roundware service to museums, artists and such…who knows.

The ‘Roundware’ trademark application is officially in process.  Shockingly, not only is ’roundware’ not a word with existing trademark claims of any sort, but as best we can tell, it isn’t a word being used in any capacity for anything at all.  At least not anything else on the internet. There are some random websites that peddle “round ware”, but that is usually referring to some sort of china, porcelain or something to eat off of.

So our application should sail through the USPTO as smoothly as anything, but it will still probably take 6 months until we are official.

I’ve just gotten up the nerve to let this site I’ve been working on for ages out into the public for some testing.

Ocean Voices Development site

Please feel free to check it out, make some recordings and let me know how it all goes.

This is the first implementation of Roundware over the internet and it’s really exciting to be able to reach so many more people.