BBYIDX is a free and open source idea-gathering application written in Ruby and distributed under the GNU General Public License. It's the basis of the Best Buy IdeaX website (no longer in production as of January 2012) and was created by and supported by Best Buy Enterprise Services Inc and Bust Out Solutions, Inc. The standard release is known as BBYIDX and features the ability for users to simply post, tag, comment and vote on ideas. It also features the ability for administrators to moderate incoming ideas and comments as well as assign work-flow to certain ideas for further exploration. It also offers the ability to group ideas by "current" or category to create new "currents" which serve as problems or issues to be solved by comments and moderation. It also features read and write APIs that can be used to make access to an instance of BBYIDX via another website or mobile application.
Open source, in most cases and especially for this kind of project simply feels right to us. The vitality, adaptability and flexibility of a project depends on input, on evolution. Open source is protection against the forces of entropy that threaten this vitality. Indeed, innovation itself works better when many minds can consider the problem from the myriad angles represented by a community.
Feel free to download the code and give it a spin. We recommend hosting on Heroku, but feel free to run it anywhere you please. For any questions or for help designing, implementing, and launching your own version of BBYIDX feel free to email for more information.
We even have API documentation.