Qowala

Qowala is a project I began alone in February 2015 while I was studying in Dublin and then I've been progressively joined by three friends some months later. The first version, available at https://live.qowala.org/, is an open source dashboard for using Twitter. It helps the user to better use social networks. One year later, we are still working on it and we have quite some ambition for this project.

Let me first describe the project technically: The Qowala team is composed by Adrien Touminet (designer), Manuel Lemaire (developer), Antoine Beauvillain (designer) and me Killian Kemps (developer). Two designers, two developers. This project has been developed with Node.js and Javascript. The source code is hosted both on Github and on Framagit for the redundancy of code.

Of course, we have a development server to let the team test code before we make it publicly available, and we have a Travis CI setup. Also, all our project management is available on the open source Taiga platform. So we are completely open about our work so the community can easily contribute and give ideas!

At first for Qowala v1, the idea was to help the user to better use Twitter and to have a better control of his usage of it. But as at the beginning I only developed the service for the Twitter network, adding more social networks with the current stack was too complicated for us. So, we need to start again for the next version and to design a good base structure to allow to later implement several networks as easily as plugins.

As we have to start all over again in any case, we are thinking about having a new approach for Qowala v2. The main idea is to "have a good 2.0 life" so it implies a great work on the design and to try to understand how people use digital technologies.