Hi, Hacker News!<p>Today we’re excited to be making our first contribution back to the tech community by open sourcing Orchestra, a system for coordinating project teams of experts and machines. It can be used to reimagine and implement all sorts of workflows, from professional services (like legal, design, and data analysis) to new product experiences (like M from Facebook). Orchestra is based upon years of research into machine-mediated expert teams. We hope you’ll come up with new and creative ways of using it!<p>At Unlimited Labs, we’re excited about building a brighter future of work and are currently building our first product on top of Orchestra. We’d love to answer any questions you have on here, or feel free to email the team at hello@unlimitedlabs.com!
(Orchestra dev here)<p>If you're curious how it can be used, Daniel Haas put together a wonderful example of how Orchestra could be used in a newsroom:<p><a href="http://orchestra.readthedocs.org/en/latest/example_use.html" rel="nofollow">http://orchestra.readthedocs.org/en/latest/example_use.html</a><p>Happy to take questions!
This looks absolutely wonderful. A few random thoughts:<p>1. I'm going to play with this as a way of documenting processes. Being able to answer "how do you develop features" or "what's best practice for X" with a usable process is great.<p>1 a) I'm particularly interested in using this for documenting how to perform experiments, and tracking experiments as they go.<p>2. I think this is amazing for progressively automating things. Split the task up into manageable, clear chunks to be performed by people. Each step can then (if it seems worth it) be replaced by code.<p>3. I don't think this is present at the moment (and it probably shouldn't be for a first release) but I'd like to see process hierarchies and importing others. I'd like to say 'Use github's "GITFLOW V2" process for managing feature additions and use "MY_COMPANY_QA V3" for reviewing features before full release'.<p>Anyway, this is great, and I look forward to playing around with it.<p>edit -<p>Even without these, I can already see myself using it just for me.<p>edit 2 - It'd be good to work on the getting started, so that there's just a "run this script" or "clone this repo". There's a lot of "download this file and copy it here" that feels like it should be scripted.
Great stuff! For now it seems like this leaves out the job of finding crowd workers. Could it be possible to do something like designing microtasks in MTurk and "stitching" the workflow together using Orchestra?
This might seem a dumb question, but can you talk about how this improves on existing productivity workflows? Does it integrate with tasking systems like Jira or is this meant to be a complete a replacement?<p>It seems high-level (and great) I'm just curious what implementing it "in the field" would look like.
Does this tie into products like PivotalTracker or JIRA to make it useful for agile software development?<p>It would be nice to be able to create tasks from stories in Pivotal, assign a reviewer to them, and, when a reviewer thumbs-up, have it automatically built into a staging server. Anything like that in the works?