Scratch

I love the idea of a more structured approach to projects and galleries, maintained by the Community.  Please check out this thread

http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=19687#p19687

Several similar proposals were made almost a year ago now.  Are any of these ideas under active development?  I wish I knew...

It looks like there is a lot of  effort and interest in tutorials (beginner and advanced) and Educational resources.  Those would probably be good ones to start with since you’d be more likely to find volunteer editors.  I’d also like too see a album about resources for Scratch projects.   I think a games section would be popular but potentially contentious.   How about a presentation / story telling section?    I’d even like to see one on introducing Scratch to the 4-6 age range.

I assume you’d give the editors a large amount of discretion when selecting projects, galleries, posts or external links when adding to their assigned album.  I think you’d want them to pick the best examples, resources, or tutorials (and continue to update them)

For example, I'd expect the Advanced Tutorial album ought to have links to projects and posts for subjects like:
Scrolling
  Basic scrolling
   Four-way scrolling
   Scrolling with sprits
   Scrolling with a scroll bar
Gravity
   Jumping
   Bouncing
   Projectile
Sorting
   Fastest
   Easiest
   Multi-key sorting
Programming with Style
   Making it readable
   Making it re-usable
Emulating recursion
Dealing with complex sprint layering
Importing data from other sources
Performance considerations
Saving the state of a complex game
Text functions
   Editors
   Sorting and comparing strings
Using Sine and Cosine

There might be some overlap between the albums but I don’t think that it would be frequent.

I think a moderated tag system would be significant improvement,  especially if the interface for the end-user allowed  people to easily browse through and find new things to explore.

Limiting the tags seems necessary, but I think you’d want some sort of  leeway to permit descriptive sub-tags.  For example,  under tutorials I could imagine a tag "how to draw."   This might apply to dozens of projects.  What might be more useful is allow open  levels under a given set of starting levels:

Tutorials
     How to Draw
         Animals       
              Horses
              Dragons
              *
         Objects
              Boxes with Perspective
              *
         People
              Male
              Female

You might want an open-ended miscellaneous anchor for tags that don’t yet have a good fit in the current hierarchy.

While we’re just brainstorming,  I’d like to hang onto two ideas from my first post.  I see a lot of very good information in the forum.  Could the tagging system be extended to individual posts?

I supposed my idea of a secondary "feature page" is a bit frivolous  but I think it would have some value in generating and maintaining interest in the tagging system.  Perhaps your ‘tag agents’ could be allowed to nominate projects to be  featured on a secondary page to provide examples of the tagging system.