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

[lancaster-imc at riseup.net]

Great to hear from you, and thanks for your input. I have started to put
my thoughts on design, and figure what I will do is put together a
snapshop, or composition of snapshots, to bring together a visual
wireframe of where my thoughts have been on design as far as lpimc
goes--and since both these projects are aligned my suggestions and
thoughts as to our final launch design are based on the same principles. I
have been screen capturing sites within and beyond indymedia that have
aspects or features and design layouts that I find appealing, and i will
post the finished product to Crabgrass as soon as I finish, with links to
the mailing list as well.

Last few weeks I have been taking a breather from internet--doing more
focus on my art and some prep work for an upcoming artist festival
masquerade I am co-artistic director of, which happens in the Fall here in
Lancaster. So I have been a bit off line. Tonight I will sit down with
Gimp and create a wireframe, and also compile a better written description
of my design layout vision for the group to read and chew on.

A week ago or so I was having some exchanges with Aaron from phillyimc,
and he pointed out to me, as we were discussing how lpimc has techies but
no real web designers (at the moment, but that is about to change I
think), that design, or look and feel front end stuff, as we are talking
about, always comes first, before backend coding, etc. Well, makes sense,
but I am not specifically a web designer, though I can create html and
have some experience with css code. The imc-alt project serves many
purposes for me personally--on the one hand I am very excited about what
this concept and project will mean to the direction of Indymedia in
general, but glad that I can be a part of it and learn about the process
of building a website of this magnitude from the start to finish.

I know we are still looking specifically for a web-design director or
sorts, and I think I may have made some connections recently with a few
interested graphic designers/web designers. three months ago I (and my
fiance) joined a local independent small business collective called the
Creative House of Lancaster, sort of an alternative chamber of commerse
for artists and other creative people. There are several media makers,
artists and web designers, chefs, journalists, radio broadcast and
communication majors, public relations and marketing experts.

Anyhow, what I am saying is there is a pool of creative experience, and so
far I have made a great connection with several videographers and graphic
designers--everyone is very excited about the prospects of an indymedia
site in Lancaster, so next meeting I will make a formal plea for
assistance, and since lpimc and imc-alt are mutually-aligned, whoever we
can pull in will be of assistance to both projects I think.

Check out the website, by the way (thechl.org). If more areas had local
independent small business collective networks based on mutual aide,
creativity and collective organizing principles all imc's would benefit.
Personally, I think a real solution to fighting corporate power is
empowering local small independent businesses, esp those focused on
sustainability and other eco-friendly business models.

So, as I said, I will frame the rest of my thoughts over tonight and the
next few days.

Peace,
mV

Oh, I have owned two gutted buses, by the way. Both canna-buses. Took one
from Washington State to bring supplies to an Indian tribe at Black Mesa,
Arizona, back in 1995. I was also taking back the Matriarch's grand
daughter, Bonnie Whitesinger, who was next in line to be the tribes
leader. We shared herb all the way down to her home and spent a great deal
of time sharing worldviews--probably one of the most enlightening
experiences of my entire life. Makes me miss the West Coast....

> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Imc-alternatives mailing list
> Imc-alternatives at lists.indymedia.org
> http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-alternatives
>