Best Buy has received much acclaim for its IdeaX platform over the last year, and rightly so. For anyone who isn’t away of IdeaX its an Idea Gathering application that allows Best Buy to capture ideas and comments from customers and staff members, which can then be voted or commented on buy other customers or staff members. The basic idea is that good ideas will organically rise to the top as votes and comments increase the “score” given to an Idea. Best Buy can then take a “good” idea and make it into a reality.
Idea Gather Applications (also known as Idea Management Apps) are not a new thing, many American corporates have already embraced this concept including Google and Dell, and while each have great apps the Best Buy IdeaX platform stands head and shoulders about the competition.
While browsing Hacker News the other day i noticed a post saying that the Best Buy IdeaX platform has been open sourced! This is a great step for Best Buy, Come on, a big non-tech US corporate releasing an Open Source product!!! its unheard of! Whats more the app is written in Ruby on Rails, which in its self is a massive step for a big corporate who would traditionally have written apps like this in C# or Java.
Check out the project home page for the full story, and be sure to take a look around the code 
The project does take some getting going, you have to me using Postgress and be sure to check out the mad Postgress Specific stuff going on in the migrations. I plan on getting a version of it up and running on EC2 over the next few days (time permitting) so I will issue some instructions in a later post.
All I can say is Hat Tip to Best Buy, Great job!
Did you notice that the default adapter in database.yml is postgres
Smart cookies, those BestBuy people. Rails 2.1.1 is a bit antiquated — I wouldn’t have thought it was that hard to move it to 2.3.8. Maybe they’re hoping somebody will do it for them, and that’s why they open sourced it?
Annoying that rake gems:install doesn’t work…
Finally got all the pre-reqs in place…
Ah, seems Postgres is actually required, for the geolocation stuff. Migrations fail on MySQL. Pants. I’m giving up on it. Did you get it working?
Yeah the migrations are full of Postgres specific SQL statements, I think it could be made to work with MySql but its not on my radar.
Its a decent application though, and for a big corporate to open source an app like that is pretty great!