[Imc-alternatives] log of design working group meeting, Sunday April 6

[Danyl Strype]

Kia ora koutou

Sorry I wasn't able to make the design meeting. I am travelling a lot  
at the moment, working on a few different campaigns including drug law  
reform (we smoked up in the grounds of our parliament just over a week  
ago, with Maryjane our CannaBus!) and stopping a new coal mine in  
undisturbed habitat. Net access and brain timeslice are both fairly  
limited until I get settled back in my flat for the winter. So great  
to see the output from your meeting but don't have the brainpower left  
tonight to chew through this log now - will save it to go through later.

In my experience with Aotearoa IMC the choice of code can change every  
few years to keep up-to-date with the latest security and features  
anyway. We started out on the original Active code, switched to  
DadaIMC, and will be switching again ASAP, probably to Drupal. When  
the final imc-cms decision is made, we will probably migrate again to  
whatever is chosen.

As Jay pointed out, regardless of what codebase we use, we need to  
describe, in  plain language, how we want the site to look and feel  
for admins, eds, and regular and casual users. My limited experience  
of doing web design taught me that it actually gets easier to design,  
not harder, the more precisely someone describes what they want from  
the site. That means we need to flesh out the general design concept  
we have brought together (a unified portal combining chronological  
newswire, fluid knowledge-base, and movement-building contact tools),  
telling the geeks exactly what we want them to build in as much detail  
as possible.

Once we have the design brief, groups of geeks can try to implement it  
by building test sites on BORG in their choice of codebase. I suspect  
a winning codebase will then emerge by a sort of natural selection -  
ie which codebase fulfills all the criteria set by the design brief?

Great news about the WiserEarth platform and good to see the progress  
on activist networking with projects like Crabgrass and MyBloc. Keep  
up the good work everyone, we are winning!

RnB
Strypes

Quoting Jay <jay at fundamentalchange.net>:

> Hi alternatives,
>
> On Sunday evening April 6 -- middle of the night/early morning April 7
> for Dimitris -- Nick, Michael, Josh M., Aaron C., Dimitris and I met in
> the #alternatives chat room to form the basis of an imc-alternatives
> design team.  Below I'll paste a log of most of the meeting, starting
> with some notes by Michael.
>
> The next meeting will be Sunday evening, April 27 9pm eastern time
> (April 28 for Europe/Oceania, 01:00 GMT).  If you're in Europe and you
> would like to come but can't because of the timing, let us know and
> maybe we can change the meeting time.
>
> Jay


-- 

http://strypey.orcon.net.nz/
"History's a lie that they teach you in school" - Living Color