Enter the apertus° laboratory

We are the community

As we have repeated countless times already: the key of how we build the AXIOM Beta is THE COMMUNITY. A lot of people have sent us emails about ideas and feature requests for the AXIOM Beta. We read them all and replied with our own thoughts to each and every one of them. But this is a very one-dimensional communication so we have looked into how we can make this process broader and more transparent, giving everyone a chance to participate - after all the community is a melting pot of ideas from people in all kinds of professions and backgrounds who maybe never worked together before.

The Platform

We needed an online platform that allows people to post ideas, discuss them, turn them into a concrete feature request that is then claimed by a developer who actually implements it and continues discussion as the feature matures and is being tested by other community members who report bugs and propose fixes. For this we started evaluating Phabricator, a platform used for example by the Blender Foundation and fell in love with it. We named our Phabricator website “the apertus° lab” - because this is where the actual research and development is now happening. We did a few weeks of extensive internal testing of the system - after more than 200 tasks being created we think it has proven very effective to collaborate and gather ideas and so we are ready to stick with it and involve the entire apertus° community. Now is the time to introduce the apertus° lab, our new task and brainstorming platform for everyone - not just the team. It is meant to become THE hub for shaping what the AXIOM Beta (and future models) will become - a platform that covers everything from gathering / discussing ideas to wishlists, proposals, tasks and bugs.

This screencast gives an introductory tour of the apertus° lab:

But we can only provide a platform - we need all of you to fill it with life, with diversity. We know it can be frustrating to explain something that is obvious for someone in one profession to someone who comes from a completely different cultural background and technical field of expertise. But we think this process is exactly what makes this so exciting - building bridges and bringing people together. We know this requires patience and dedication - so stick with us and don’t give up easily.

Help us build (Y)OUR dream camera

Start by browsing existing tasks and wishes, see what others have written already and then don’t be afraid to reply to an existing task or even create your own suggestion entry. If you see something that you can see yourself working on, do it! Even if you don’t have the time to complete it you can share your results of just the ground work and someone else might be able to take care of what is left much more easily than starting from scratch.

Take me to the apertus° lab!

Image by Horiavarlan - Creative Commons License