[Imc-alternatives] questions about indy-alt implementation

[Jay]

Hi John and all,

A huge burst of happiness to everyone who was at the code-a-thon 
Saturday.  There was a lot of progress!  I just dropped in 
intermittently so I don't know the gory details about what was 
accomplished Saturday or what the plan is for the future, but someone 
will send a summary and an action plan soon.

John, I have some answers for you, and others can chime in too.

At 12/29/2008, you wrote:
>hey folks,
>
>this is john, i'm helping get your drupal off the ground. i'm at the
>point now where I thought it'd be helpful to clarify what I'm seeing
>on the designs before doing too much more work.
>
>let's start with this one:
>http://thunderwhip.com/imc/Home-Page.jpg
>
>so we have on the one hand a "newswire" and a "knowledge wire" by
>understanding is that the newswire should really be a "solutions
>wire"?  or should the "solutions wire" be renamed the "knowledge wire"
>and should i make a new "news wire"?
>
>in any case, these are two parallel open-publishing systems, with the
>first focused on more ephemeral reports and the latter on longer-term
>howto-type info, right?

The grand vision for the site is to have three equal parts of the 
site that are integrated with each other:

-- "News" featuring the SolutionsWire (our open publishing news 
wire), as well as news-style features.
-- "Knowledge" which is our "knowledge-base," a wiki-fied information 
area with very practical information focused on building alternatives and
-- "Network" which is our "social justice networking" area where 
individuals and organizations will have profiles and use tools we 
provide to organize their own projects and collaborate with each other.

The main page of the site will be an amalgam of the best and most 
recent posts from each section.  (i.e. the three sections and three 
newswires on http://www.thunderwhip.com/imc/Home-Page.jpg).  Each of 
these sections will also have its own "landing page."  "news" will 
look a lot like a traditional imc site: 
http://www.thunderwhip.com/imc/News-Page.jpg), "Network" will feature 
profiles of individuals and groups 
(http://www.thunderwhip.com/imc/Network-Page.jpg) and I envision the 
Knowledge-base looking and working a lot like WikiHow.

To provide an example of how these things would work together, I see 
Robbt posted an article on the SolutionsWire of the test site 
(http://www.domain23.info/content/solar-power-cheap).  This article 
would appear on the SolutionsWire, which you'd see at the top right 
of the main page and also along the right column of the "News" 
page.  Because of the way he categorized it (and maybe, if we add an 
opportunity to tag articles, depending on the tags he chooses), the 
article page would also offer links to News articles on the site 
about Solar power, articles in the Knowledge-base offering 
step-by-step instructions for building DIY solar projects, and to 
profie pages of individuals and organizations from the Network 
section who do solar work.

Similarly, if someone posts an article on tke Knowledge-base about 
how to build a solar DIY system, the article would offer a link to 
Robbt's article on the Solutions Wire and individuals/organizations 
from the Network section that do this kind of work.  Three parallel 
sections, but with the information integrated.


>you can see a working version of the basic structure for a
>newswire+tiered features in the center column at domain23.info -
>obviously needing work on pictures and styles, but coming along.
>we'll be able to quickly replicate this setup for the three wires, but
>i want to get the details straight first.
>
>my understanding is that the "knowledge wire" pieces should have some
>editableness to them, i.e. it should be more wiki like.....

Right.

>do we want
>these pieces to be "structured", i.e. more like books with chapters,
>or just plain flat articles?

Hmm.  I say we should steal liberally from the structure of WikiHow, 
Instructables and other similar things.  Whatever works for them, 
that's what we should do.

>  do we want to just have a wiki
>free-for-all, or do we want to have groups (could be user managed) to
>manage specific areas?  my vote would be for the former for now (the
>free-for-all), moving to the latter as the site gets more traffic.

Makes sense to me.

>finally, what is the "network wire"?  is this rss feed based? manually
>entered by editors?  another open publishing wire?  some combination
>of all three?

The idea of what actually will appear on the "network wire" is still 
a bit fuzzy, but I think it would inculde a list of the most recent 
or most recently updated profiles, and maybe posts from forums or 
from an eventual "wants/needs" section (sort of like a 
craigslist/classifieds section for alternatives projects).  I like 
the idea of the smiling faces of the most recent people who have 
posted profiles appearing on the main page as well as on the networking page.

Does this help clarify things?  Definitely feel free to ask more 
questions.  The more we flesh this out the better our site will be.
Jay


>-john
>
>
>
>--
>
>this is where my public key can be found:
>gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 03817826
>Key fingerprint = 6C11 8D70 2ADE EFA9 498D  72CB 77EA 391A 0381 7826
>
>
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