[Developers] Opensource website

[Arni Magnusson]

In a previous message, I wrote:

> If anyone has a reasonably generic ecological tool implemented in ADMB, 
> [FishBox] might be an appropriate site to distribute it.

This may be an important gap in the ADMB Project, the lack of an 
appropriate site to share models. The current 
http://admb-project.org/community/tutorials-and-examples could be made 
more formal, creating categories like General Statistics, Ecology, 
Fisheries, Social Sciences, Finance, etc. A category called Tutorials 
might not be necessary, since there is no clear distinction between a full 
model and a tutorial. If a model is only a few lines and calculates the 
mean, then it fits in the General Statistics category.

Given a large collection of models, it might be best to maintain a 
separate website, something like ADMB-Forge. The R-Forge 
(http://r-forge.r-project.org) website is powered by Gforge, which is 
designed to help people to coauthor projects over the internet. Since 
that's not how typical ADMB models are written, we may be looking for a 
simpler website for sharing and discussing finalized models. The AFSC 
stock assessment models 
(http://www.afsc.noaa.gov/refm/stocks/admod/temp_index.htm) is another 
example.

It seems very useful, if not inevitable, that ADMB models are collected 
and organized. It would probably be best if the ADMB Project itself would 
take the lead and oversee such a collection. This would enable ADMB users 
to (1) reuse existing models instead of rewriting them, (2) study and 
learn from more examples, and hopefully (3) discuss and collaborate to 
improve existing models.

I'm not volunteering to work on this myself, but what are your thoughts? 
Work from http://admb-project.org/community/tutorials-and-examples, or 
start a separate website?

Arni