It's tough trying to keep track of the comings and goings in the open source world. A typical code base might depend on 50+ open source projects but nobody has time to hop around all those Github repos and read through commits, pull requests or even releases. It's just too much work. On top of that, how do you keep an eye on new projects?

I'd like to solve this problem by combining the power of machines and humans to create a nice weekly summary of everything you care about.

What does that mean?

First, let me describe how machines help. I'm developing software to monitor and categorize popular Github repos. If a new Javascript framework comes out, I'll discover it, tag it and watch for new releases. When a new release comes out, I'll add it to your digest. But only if you subscribe to Javascript as a technology you want to track.

Now for the humans!

My monitoring technology isn't designed to summarize releases in a super condensed, readable format. That is a really hard problem for machines. So I'm going to ask the crowd for help. I'm building tools for the community to submit release notes. The first tool is a microformat that allows anyone to Tweet a release note. If you share a release note, everyone else benefits. And likewise, you will benefit from crowd contributions.

Thanks for learning about Shifty. I hope you'll subscribe and join the community. Please feel free to contact me with ideas & feedback dane@shifty.io