Patent ID: 7292990

Claim:
A method for facilitating the distributed development of software programs comprising: (a) providing skill ratings for a plurality of developers; (b) communicating specifications for a software program to a subset of the plurality of developers; (c) receiving at least one submission in response to the communicated specifications; (d) deriving a score using one or more scorecards for the at least one submission from a review of the submission that includes evaluation of compliance with the communicated specifications by a plurality of review board members in a coding competition, wherein one or more of the review board members are each rated developers not including the developer who submitted the at least one submission; (e) deriving updated skill ratings for the developers based on the derived scores and the provided skill ratings; and (f) selecting one of the at least one submission for inclusion in a software repository based on its derived score; and (g) storing the at least one submission selected in the software repository.