[Imc-alternatives] Status of PhillyIMC and some CMS comments.

[ryan]

> We sat down to have this conversation a while back, and decided that  
> it wouldn't be worth our time to develop a new CMS, as we wanted to  
> build a new community site, and didn't want to pioneer a new software  
> development project.  We have more energy working with community, and  

Hi -- 

I know I'm not part of this group and I don't know all the background
and maybe I'm butting in where I shouldn't, but I wanted to add one
little bit of clarity. 

The imc-cms project shares your objective of NOT wanting to write a
whole new cms from scratch. None of our "short list" proposals include
writing a new cms from scratch. We also want to find an existing
project which allows us to leverage an already-established, enormous
developers community. Our "short list" is:

1) Drupal - big developers community, as you say,
2) Plone - equally enormous developers community,
3) CakePHP - a huge developers community

All 3 have huge volunteer programmer communities in addition to
corporate backing of one kind of or another.

When this idea was conceived in Sao Paulo in July 2006, it was born
from discussions between sf-active and mir veterans who lamented the
fact that we were not only dealing with extremely small development
teams, but that we had also split them between 2 or 3 or even more
projects (mir, sf-active, dada, etc).

While too much focus on technology is bad for the organization at
large, this *is* primarily an internet project. And we have problems
that affect the community which have technological solutions. For
instance, when a box is taken offline by law enforcement, the
"community" comes looking for the tech's to find out when the site
will be back online. When there is a DDOS hacker attack or spam
attack, the "community" comes to the tech group to make their site
fast and usable again. When it comes time to pay for bandwidth that a
popular video spiked traffic, the "community" puts it on us to dig in
our pockets and put out the money (although, I must say, there have
been generous donations from IMC Global and many kind individuals
but what we've paid as individuals far exceeds the donations we've 
gotten in the lasat 6-7 years). Anyway, you get my point :) 

Taking Indymedia into the next generations of the internet, and
resuming our role as internet innovators, involves two parts and one 
cannot ignore the other. Every web project I've ever worked has had:
1) A web/technology group,
2) A product/spec/feature development group comprised of people who
don't have advanced tech skills.

What imc-cms will need in January and February (and really, the work
could start now) is an active, healthy, organized, diverse product and
features spec team. SF-IMC has formed some ideas that they were going
to launch before the ahimsa/communitycolo crisis side-tracked it. And
imc-alternatives also has a prototype ready, based in Drupal.

We want to unite the developers on the sfa and mir side who have been
working on this for a long time and form a base which will dedicate
itself to a new project, designed out of our experience of supporting
the community for so long. And, we want to do everthing right --
hyper-organized, well-planned releases, a super-organized ticketing
system (already set up and almost ready to launch for lf-related
websites). And that would include product/feature specifications from
a group which could dedicate itself to talking all this stuff through,
something that engineers can be a part of if they want but aren't
required because we have allllllllll this other stuff today. It's a
division of labor used in every profesional/opensource software
project I've ever been a part of.

And if imc-alternatives has a ton of non-tech energy bubbling over, I
would invite you all to come join us at something like imc-cms-spec
mailing list :) Or provide us with some spec documents from
imc-alternatives. Let's get involved together! 

I think it is something that imc-cms is going to need at some point
and if you all have the energy now, let's not let it dissipate and
let's start collborating! We HAVE the ability to be an internet
phenomenon again -- we are an open source, massively huge web 2.0 or
even 3.0 that does what WELL-FUNDED internet startups here in SF are
struggling to do and are failing at. I want to be a part of something
like that! I want to make that phenomenon strong again.

Well, this is long enough, I think :)
-ryan