Open Source Food

Opensourcefood (OSF for short) is a recipe social network with a strong visual element. It is the only recipe site that guarantees a picture for every recipe, and allows the owners to license the picture and recipe out under various creative commons licenses. To date there are over 2000 recipes (and growing) on OSF, each with a picture, all created by the community.

Apart from the usual social networking features (add recipe, comments etc) the site has some unique technology and promotional points.

1) Members can be promoted to PRO status if they gather enough votes. PRO members are flagged with a little red mark, a sign that their recipes are of a high quality. Recipes in the main listing can be filtered by whether they are by PRO members or not.

2) When adding a recipe members can AUTO TAG it - tags are created automatically based on the content. This saves users time.

3) Spotlight recipes - recipes that gather enough votes are promoted to spotlight status and get posted in the header of the site (next to the logo) attracting more visits to that recipe.

OSF is a one-man project, by Tokyo-based Web Producer yongfook (Jon Anthony Yongfook Cockle). http://www.yongfook.com

It is built in the php MVC framework Code Igniter and uses jquery for front-end scripting.

Yongfook is a serial web-app builder, responsible for the popular (but now deadpooled) 8apps.com, and also did the front end work for ZapZap.com (now deadpooled!) - both have been featured on techcrunch. OSF is his personal project and by far his most personally significant project to date, yongfook himself being an avid cook:
http://opensourcefood.com/people/yongfook

Yongfook is based in Tokyo and works with various Japanese companies as an outside consultant, building web apps and overseeing production. Yongfook has worked in the Tokyo web industry for several years, with experience working in small web production agencies such as IMG SRC as a senior design engineer, to working in a behavioral analytics and research group at advertising giant Dentsu. Yongfook will be starting his own production agency in 2008.