/chaos

A social coding experiment that updates its own code democratically

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

ChaosBot

Chaos, the vacant and infinite space which existed according to the ancient cosmogonies previous to the creation of the world, and out of which the gods, men, and all things arose.

ChaosBot is a social coding experiment to see what happens when the absolute direction of a software project is turned over to the open source community.

There was clearly a kitty missing.

How it works

  1. Fork the code and make any changes you wish.
  2. Open a pull request.
  3. If there is general approval* from the community, the PR will be merged automatically by ChaosBot.
  4. ChaosBot will automatically update its own code with your changes and restart itself.
  5. Go to #1

In effect, you get to change the basic purpose and functionality of ChaosBot, at your discretion.

What will ChaosBot do? It's up to you. The only thing it does now is update itself with your changes. And as long as the code connecting itself to new changes remains intact, ChaosBot will continue to grow and change according to your will.

Some things it could do

  • Provide some useful service to people.
  • Be malicious.
  • Recreate itself in a different programming language.
  • Break itself and die.

There is no set purpose. What ChaosBot makes itself into is entirely up to the imagination of the open source community.

Voting

Votes on a PR are sourced through the following mechanisms:

  • A comment that contains 👍 or 👎 somewhere in the body
  • A 👍 or 👎 reaction on the PR itself
  • An accept/reject pull request review
  • The PR itself counts as 👍 from the owner

Weights and thresholds

Votes are not counted as simple unit votes. They are adjusted by taking the log of a user's followers, to the base of some low follower count. The idea is that voters with more followers should have more weight in their vote, but not so much that it is overpowering.

Vote thresholds must also be met for a PR to be approved. This is determined as a percentage of the number of watchers on the repository. However, it is more important to vote against bad PRs than to assume the minimum threshold will not be met.

See the source code for more details.

Death Counter

Chaosbot has died 2 times. This counter is incremented whenever the trunk breaks and the server must be restarted manually.

Server details

  • ChaosBot runs Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty
  • It has root access on its server. This means you are able to install packages and perform other privileged operations, provided you can initiate those changes through a pull request.
  • Its domain name is chaosthebot.com, but nothing is listening on any port...yet.
  • It's hosted on a low-tier machine in the cloud. This means there aren't a ton of resources available to it: 2TB network transfer, 30GB storage, 2GB memory, 1 cpu core. Try not to deliberately DoS it.
  • MySQL is installed locally.

FAQ

Q: What happens if ChaosBot merges bad code and doesn't start again?

A: Errors can happen, and in the interest of keeping things interesting, ChaosBot will manually be restarted and the death counter will be incremented.

Q: What is "general approval" from the community?

A: Users must vote on your PR, through either a 👍 or 👎 comment or reaction, or a accept/reject pull request review. See Voting

Q: What if ChaosBot has an problem that can't be solved by a PR?

A: Please open a project issue and a real live human will take a look at it.