One of the big changes coming down the pike for OGA 2.0 is the new art interface.  Our current interface works relatively well for finding and commenting on existing art, which is good from the standpoint of OGA being an archive.  On the other hand, if you're an artist looking to improve a piece of art based on comments from the community, you have to go to the forum for that.  Or, if you want to, say, fork a piece of art (in other words, create a new derivative of it while leaving the original alone), there's no way to indicate that you've done that except for leaving a comment.

Here's what I'd like to see in OGA 2.0:

• The most recent version of the art (along with relevant meta info) will appear at the top of the page, much as it does right now.
• Art licenses will show up as icons (if available), which link to the CC deeds for those licenses.  Deprecated licenses (such as BSD and ZLIB) will show up as plaintext, if supported at all.
• If multiple previews exist for a piece of art, you can use a Lightbox to page through them.
• Beside the artist's name, there will be a link that allows you to view other works by that artist.
• If you are the submitter, you will see a link that allows you to revise the current work.  This will replace the "edit" tab and have the same functionality.
• Immediately below the meta information will be a list of "collections" and projects that contain the current piece of art.  More info on collections will come later.
• Along with the list of collections will be a list of "forks", or derivative works based on current piece of art, as well as a list of works that the current piece is itself based on.
• Below the list of forks will be a link that reads "fork this work," which will bring you to a special submit form that will create a new piece of art under the same license(s) as the original, which will be linked as a fork from the current piece.
• Potentially, if you click on a link, you will be able to see a graphical dependency tree for the work you are looking at.  Whether we do this will depend on how hard it is to implement. :)
• Where the comments section resides right now will be a timeline of comments, revisions, and forks, starting with the original submission.
• Each revision of the work will include a small preview image (viewable in a lightbox) and an author comment, if applicable.  Revisions will fit in with comments.
• Each fork of the work will have a small preview image (same as the revision) a comment from the author of the fork, and a link to the forked work.
• Commenters will be able to submit files (including images) along with their comments, which will be previewablein a lightbox as well.

If I can come up with a workable way to do this, it would be nice to allow someone to propse a revision to a work -- that is, submit a revision to the author, which they could then choose to accept or reject.  If the author rejects a revision, the submitter would of course be free to fork it.  The author would maintain the right to review proposed revisions to a work, and the people whose revisions are accepted would get their names added automatically as co-authors.

Hopefully I'm making sense.  I'll try to come up with a mockup soon so people can see an example of this in action.  As you can see, the ultimate idea here is to move beyond the simple "archive" idea that we see here on OGA and so many other sites, and into a space that will make it convenient for artists to communicate, collaborate, and revise their work.

Thoughts?  Ideas?  Please post them here. :)

Bart