[Imc-alternatives] Hello everyone!

[Jay]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks so much for posting this to the imc-alternatives list.  It's a 
really exciting window into what's going on in the indymedia tech universe.

I'm glad to see the CMS discussion is being revived, and that 
indymedia techies are leading the charge toward developing Web 3.0!

I don't know how much you know about the alternatives project, though 
Sheri seems to have filled you in.  Yes, the tech conversations 
really overlap.  Over a several month conversation in which we looked 
at several CMS choices we decided to program a primarly drupal-based 
Alternatives IMC site on top of the PhillyIMC's drupal site.  We 
would meld that with some kind of already established networking 
software, like Activism Network or Crabgrass, enabling there to be a 
primarily drupal-powered news-oriented alternatives site blended with 
really powerful networking components.

We have been inching toward making this happen.  A couple weeks ago 
the PhillyIMC Drupal beta site opened for testing, so that's a major 
step forward.

A number of times while pushing the alternatives project forward 
we've put out calls to the indymedia world for volunteers.  Some IMC 
techs have joined the project, others are watching from a distance to 
see how things are going to go before jumping in.  I think you're 
right about the evaluation that if indymedia's core tech crowd gets 
behind a project it's much much more likely to move forward that if 
there is only patchwork of tech energy.  We'd be overjoyed if the 
alternatives project and the indymedia tech team's core goals blend 
and we all move the same direction!

One important thing to consider about the alternatives project that 
differentiates it from other Indymedia-of-the-future visions is that 
we've picturing the site advancing indymedia both technically and 
politically.  Technically, yes, absoulutely, indymedia has to move 
into the future -- or heck, at least into the present.

Politically, I feel as if I can say that most of us have come to this 
project because we believe "the movement," whatever that means, is 
generally scattered.  We're tired of hitting our heads against the 
wall being reactive, spending all our energy protesting one terrible 
thing and that, especially when there are more and more terrible 
things to protest every day.  We've talked about how the future of 
the movement -- and for that matter, much more -- depends on people 
breaking out of this reactive mindset and empowering theselves to 
actually build viable alternatives to the current dominant 
society.  This kind of positive energy is essential to reviving 
movements for justice, and especially essential toward building a 
sustainable world.

The alternatives site would provide news and accumulated knowledge 
about this very positive information, and it would also be a place 
for people who are making this change happen every day to network 
with each other to share work and recognize that they're part of an 
expanding community.  So, our vision here is not just to operate a 
web 2.0 site, but to operate a social justice movement 2.0 site.  We 
believe the unity of the technological and political advances could 
be very powerful, and inspiring on almost every level.

I'd be more than happy to talk with you about the alternatives 
project to fill you in on any details that may be slipping between 
the cracks in the online documentation.  At the very least we should 
keep communication lines open at all times and find a way for all 
these things to happen together.

cheers!
Jay






At 11/8/2007, you wrote:
>Hi everyone,
>
>Recently I've been exchanging emails with Sheri about Techmeet 2007, a
>month-long conference that just ended. She let me know that this list
>(imc-alternatives), with the IMC 2.0/3.0 talk, has started to drift
>into topics that overlap with what we talk about in Techmeet and the
>accompanying imc-cms list.
>
>So, I thought I would take the opportunity to talk about Techmeet and
>imc-cms on this list as well as take on some of this list's motif --
>which seems to be a little more personal with people talking about
>their experiences, which I guess I would like to do a little.
>
>Indymedia continues to be a phenomenon because it is a huge, diverse,
>global network and lots of people have lots of really different
>experiences within it.
>
>The background to Techmeet 2006 Sao Paulo, in some ways, includes the
>story of *some* of these IMC people's lives and experiences over the
>past 7 years -- I can't believe how long it has been -- 7 years now.
>
>The experience of some IMC people (myself included) is that for every
>single day of those 7 years, we have been online and available doing
>support and maintenance for Indymedia websites. I helped program
>sf-active, one of the CMS'es used by many active IMC sites. And every
>single day, I am on irc.indymedia.org, talking to the other volunteers
>who work every single day doing support & maintenance. It isn't really
>an exaggeration to say every single day -- sure, a few days missed
>here and there, but for the most part -- every single day. That's
>like, 2500+ days.
>
>I often tell people that my Indymedia workplace -- #sfkids and
>#sf-active on irc.indymedia.org -- is more "real" than the physical
>office I would go to for the various jobs I've held over the last 7
>years. And I used to pick jobs based on how easy the job would be to
>get away with doing IMC work on the job. I work for myself now, so I
>don't have to do that anymore.
>
>A lot of volunteers have come and gone. Some were with us for a couple
>years. Some just a couple months. Some only during big events. But
>there are some of us who were *always* there. And that's our
>experience with Indymedia :) There's more than that -- the protests,
>the conferences, the events, the screenings, the media production, all
>that too. But there exists a backbone of tecnicos who keep this stuff
>running.
>
>And, actually, almost every day there *is* something going on. People
>come with support questions. People come because somehow their IMC
>site got broken. We deal with hack attacks. We deal with spam attacks.
>We deal with network problems. And that's just the day-to-day stuff.
>
>So at Techmeet 2006, a lot of us who have worked together like this
>every single day finally got to meet each other face to face for the
>first time. As you can imagine, after 6 years of daily contact,
>meeting like that was a profound and incredibly fun time :)))))
>
>At Techmeet 2006, a lot of the core sf-active developers were there
>and a lot of the core mir developers were there. These are the two
>main IMC codebases. Over the years, there has been a tongue-in-cheek
>rivalry between the two so there was fun with that. For instance, we
>all watched a FIFA World Cup match between Italy (IMC Italy runs sf-
>active) versus Germany (IMC Germany runs mir) and we drank like fishes
>and the developers from the respective codebases bet the restaurant
>bill on the game :) --- Italy won, BTW :))))
>
>I say all this just to give you a sense of what it was like. More
>relevantly, at this meeting, we decided that the lives for these
>"every day" technical volunteers had to change. We couldn't keep being
>the only ones doing this. We had to distribute the work load more. We
>need more people taking money out of their pockets when financial
>emergencies come up.
>
>We talked about this endlessly and from every possible angle. And we
>decided that we would take proposals back to the sf-active and mir
>groups and propose a grand merger of the two development teams. We
>would find an existing CMS with an already large codebase, we would
>adopt it and make it work for Indymedia sites, and we would all start
>working for the same cause. Just this alone would give us a big enough
>development pool to make our lives a lot more sane -- and we figured
>that the momentum from all this would get more people involved, which
>has proven out to be true.
>
>But this is no easy task. We had to consider all the requirements. We
>had to evaluate the dozens and dozens of CMS'es. We had to find the
>top contenders and push them harder. So Techmeet 2006 ended and we
>announced our work on every major Indymedia mailing list, asking for
>more people to join our effort, and get the job done. And a lot more
>people did join the effort and we did our work on the imc-cms mailing
>list.
>
>But then something horrible happened. Actually, two things. First, it
>was announced that ahimsa was not going to continue hosting Indymedia
>sites. Second, it was announced that CCCP (where linefeed, stray, and
>a whole bunch of IMC sites are hosted) was closing. This meant that in
>a given timeframe, almost every IMC site would be offline. It was a
>huge crisis. And we had to respond to it.
>
>The crisis was resolved by even more time and labor spent, even more
>money out of pockets (although it should be noted that the Global IMC
>Fund also helped, which is great), and even less time available to
>spend on the imc-cms project, which is the long-term solution for all
>of these problems.
>
>The crisis was resolved and the IMC sites didn't actually ever go
>offline. A core group of "everyday tech people" from San Francisco
>started a NEW tech co-op, San Francisco Community Colocation Project
>(www.sfccp.net) and that has now been hosting IMC sites for going on a
>year in January. Other folks put in their sweat and time and money to
>set up new servers that helped with the rest.
>
>It took months of hard work and coordinating to solve that crisis. A
>lot of people probably don't even know how close we came to just not
>having an Indymedia network anymore.
>
>With the crises more or less resolved, we headed into the time for
>Techmeet 2007, which we had decided would be "distributed." We had
>little Techmeet's in cities all over the world, over a period of 4
>weeks, with weekly audio/video conferences from IMC's from all over
>the world. It was really cool and really inspiring. Some of the audio
>and video is going to be released soon.
>
>On the imc-cms front, the Techmeet participants reviewed the research
>that was done over the previous year, albeit hindered by the
>aforementioned server crises. You can see this summary here -
>http://www.techmeet.org/txt/CMS_Summary
>
>After reviewing all the research, it was generally decided by that
>group that we would take roughly 2 months to intensely evaluate 3
>different approaches to a new CMS that we'd all work on together:
>
>1) Drupal-style PHP CMS program - specifically, Drupal
>2) Python-based app server type CMS - specifically, Plone
>3) Rapid app development from scratch CMS - specifically, CakePHP
>
>It was decided that for a month, we would do a complete analysis of
>the 3 approaches. And around the beginning of December, we would
>compare these deep analyses and decide what other info we need to make
>a decision. Then, we spend December coming up with that data/info, and
>we make a decision about which CMS to go with on January 1, 2008.
>
>There is a lot of momentum around this entire 2-month project, you can
>feel the excitement about it in the "irc air" (a strange virtual world
>we exist in). I am involved in the eval group for #3 and we're meeting
>on Saturday morning. Eval group #2 is meeting soon, I forget when.
>Eval group #1 is already underway with the existing efforts to create
>an indymedia that sits on top of Drupal.
>
>We held an sf-active meeting the other week and we were talking about
>this and someone said that they had seen a lot of "next-generation
>indymedia" projects being talked about over the years. And that they
>come and go and don't amount to anything. And I realized and said that
>the difference here is that this effort is, in large part, started by
>this group of "everyday tech people" for Indymedia. And we are doing
>it because we NEED a change in our lives. We NEED to do this a
>different way, we NEED this new cms project to succeed and happen --
>quickly. Because when it's successful, which it will be, our lives
>will be dramatically improved.
>
>And we know what it means to build, operate and maintain this
>software. We deeply understand the technical challenges that are faced
>after 7 years of experience. We know what the problems are that we
>need to fix. We know it and deeply feel it every day.
>
>Anyway, it feels good to talk about these experiences and have a forum
>for this. I hope that everyone here checks out Techmeet, and what
>we're doing with imc-cms, and gets involved and helps out. You don't
>need to be a techie. We need user feedback, we need admin feedback, we
>need documentation, we need alllllll kinds of help in doing this.
>
>Also, none of this e-mail really addresses something else I'm
>passionate about right now, which is improving the quality of Indymedia
>websites to surpass the web 2.0 commercial sites which have been
>coming out. I live and work in the center of the web 2.0 industry and
>it really irritates me because indymedia was one of the first web 2.0
>sites, and we innovated on that a lot, and we CAN be the innovators
>again, outpacing the commercial sites that are out there, who are
>stealing *our* great idea that people had way back when IMC was born.
>A new IMC with a big development team that leverages an even larger
>development team (by going with an established codebase rather than
>totally writing from scratch) is exactly what we need to create these
>innovations. And that's exactly what those of us who have been working
>on Techmeet and imc-cms intend to build.
>
>Looking through this list's archives, I see a few ideas and some
>projects, and I'm hoping that people who are passionate on here can
>find a way to work with us on this project. Phily's Drupal efforts
>seem a perfect example.
>
>Anyway, those are my thoughts. If you read this long, thank you :)
>-ryan
>
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