Outercurve Foundation Announces Creation of Innovators Gallery, Contribution of Mayhem Project

WAKEFIELD, Mass., March 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The Outercurve Foundation today announced acceptance of the Mayhem project into the newly-formed Innovators Gallery. Mayhem is a simple scripting system for non-programmers which allows users to interconnect services and devices within and beyond the Windows ecosystem. Mayhem is the anchor project of the Innovators Gallery, and was contributed by Microsoft, the foundation's primary sponsor.

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The Innovators Gallery, created by the foundation's Board of Directors, hosts open source projects based on innovative and leading edge technologies, supporting their communities by giving them a place to ensure the security and longevity of these compelling projects. Working with the gallery manager and foundation staff, Mayhem contributors will be able to increase the project's community participation by making it easy for individuals and companies to contribute to the Mayhem project.

Project Leader, Paul Dietz, sees Mayhem as part of the next step in the evolution of personal computing. "The PC will move from being a tool that people use, to a servant that people command to take action on their behalf." Mayhem takes instructions of the form "when this event happens, do this reaction". The power of Mayhem is that events and reactions can be almost anything. Eli White, Development Leader, notes that "an event can be something local, like pressing a key on an Xbox controller, saying a verbal command, or using an interface on your mobile phone. But Mayhem also has network-based events that use data from the Internet such as stock prices, weather, updating of social networking sites, etc." Reactions are similarly diverse, performing functions like running PowerPoint, controlling home automation devices, sending email, etc.

Almost any device or service in the Windows ecosystem can be used to add events and reactions to Mayhem. To foster the creation of additional Add-Ons that extend the power of Mayhem, the Outercurve Foundation is hosting the "Make Your Own Mayhem" Contest 2012. Developers are invited to submit any number of creative add-ons to Mayhem by midnight (Pacific Time), April 30, 2012. Submissions will be evaluated by judges Johnny Chung Lee, Rapid Evaluator, Google; IBM Fellow John Cohn, and MK Haley, Associate Executive Producer – Faculty, Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center.  Awards include Honorable Mention, Most Awesome Add-on, People's Choice (most 'Likes' on entry video) and the Mayhem Master's Award 2012, awarded to the developer of the best collection of Mayhem add-ons. Over US$5000 in prizes will be awarded.

"Mayhem is an exciting project with plans for drawing in a wide community of contributors and users," said Paula Hunter, Executive Director, Outercurve Foundation, and the Gallery Manager. "We're pleased to accept the Mayhem project into the new Innovators Gallery, and are interested in evaluating additional projects that meet the criteria of the gallery."

Mayhem is available for download at http://MakeMayhem.com. For more information on the Innovators Gallery or the Outercurve Foundation please visit http://www.Outercurve.org.  

About The Outercurve Foundation

The Outercurve Foundation is a non-profit foundation providing software IP management and project development governance to enable and encourage organizations to develop software collaboratively in open source communities for faster results.  The Outercurve Foundation is the only open source foundation that is platform, technology, and license agnostic. For more information about the Outercurve Foundation contact [email protected]

SOURCE The Outercurve Foundation