[Imc-alternatives] any forward motion?

[lancaster-imc at riseup.net]

Great to actually receive an email from the list. I posted twice and never
saw it pop up. I am a non-tech, like Jay, but I feel I can be helpful in 
many ways, including research, networking, artistically speaking (design),
content production (site as well as publicizing the project via articles
to local newswires, etc), marketing and branding.

I'm just not a programmer beyond basic html and css.

So, on the topic of branding, I think it would be wise to stick with
"IMC-Alternatives," as that has been the name circulated via lists and
other discussions for the past year or so, and any change would be
confusing, to say the least. Plus, "Alternatives" is perfect, when you
consider its other applications, such as alternative energy, alternative
lifestyles, etc. The IMC-Alternatives Project will inspire the next
generation of IMC sites, and hopefully provide the cms code that can be
more regularly and easily updated for imcs, much like Drupal and other
long-standing codebases.

So, I have a few questions:

1. Is php cake the agreed upon cms language? If so, the LPIMC
(http://lancasterimc.wikispaces.com) tech has built a bare bones site with
php cake and has promised to contact Jay soon, probably will work on this
project with the other techies. Currently he is building our new-imc site
in Drupal, but could be swayed to put energy into IMC-Alt--we have been
working on preparing our IMC, mostly in the support of community,
documentation, etc for the past year, and are very eager to launch. We
want to put our energy into something unique and sustainable. IMC-Alt is a
very inspiring project.

2. Is there any possibility of any level of collaborative or joint
connections between IMC-Alt and Crabgrass (built with ruby on rails) by
riseup? I think what they are doing with social-networking is going to be
amazing post-alpha, and I wonder if there is a way to create a code-based
connection, or in some other way learn from what they are building. I
guess I mention that, as a non-techie, because I wonder if what they are
doing with social networking could save some of the creative energy
towards developing the other aspects of this new IMC website model.
https://we.riseup.net

3. Riley from IMC-DC joined the chat the other night, and said no one
(including me, oops) joined it. Will the regularly planned meet-ups be
beginning again soon? I recently joined the IMC-Alternatives project, list
and the imc-cms list too.

Peace,
Michael Hodgson
Lancaster Pennsylvania-IMC
http://lancasterimc.org
http://lancasterimc.wikispaces.com

> Kia ora koutou
>
> I'm back with batteries recharged and share Jay's hopes that
> imc-alternatives
> 1.0 will hit the web in the near future. For now I'm happy to leave the
> experienced geeks working through the imc-cms list to thrash out what sort
> of
> software would be best to build our site on. I'd like to turn my attention
> to
> the core business (excuse the yuk corporate speak ;) of an Indymedia site
> -
> reporting news.
>
> Over the next few months I aim to pick up on a suggestion made last year -
> writing the sorts of stories we want to feature on our proposed
> alternatives
> site and posting them to Aotearoa Indymedia. Ideally once our site goes
> live, I
> would be able to continue doing this, and tag things when posting to A-IMC
> to be
> automatically added to the solutions-wire on the alternatives site.
>
> For this to work I need to get the A-IMC geeks to add a tag to our topic
> categories. So I reckon now would be a good time to confirm a consensus on
> the
> name of our project and our site, so they can add that name as the tag.
> Are we
> happy with 'alternatives' or do people have other preferences? There is a
> list
> of the various suggestions that came out of the last brainstorm on this at
> the
> bottom of this page:
> http://www.openplans.org/projects/imc-alternatives/the-website-vision
>
> If we don't have consensus on alternatives, what I suggest is we use that
> polling tool we were using last year to set times for irc meetings. Maybe
> we can
> vote to narrow it down to a shortlist, then see if we can get consensus by
> discussion from there?
>
> RnB
> Strypes
>
> Jay wrote:
>> Happy new year everyone!
>>
>> This year, 2008 for all you Gregorians out there, is going to be the
>> year of the alternatives website's birth, I know it.  I'm currently
>> pinning my hopes on the imc-cms decision to happen really soon (Cake
>> is still the front-runner) and for the work around that project by
>> indymedia techies to catapult our project forward.  All this is a
>> matter for us to discuss on this list, of course, but I'm in the
>> hope-pinning mood today.  Below is an update from the imc-cms process.
>>
>> At 12/31/2007, you wrote:
>>>> I was just thinking of y'all.  Any forward motion toward the CMS
>>> decision?
>>>> There doesn't seem to be much action on the imc-cms list.  Do you
>>>> think
>>>> things will pick up again soon after new year's festivities?
>>
>>> From Ryan:
>>
>>> Yeah, there's good news on this front. There has been a TON of work
>>> happening behind-the-scenes on the imc-cms project. I just sent an
>>> update e-mail about everything that's been happening to the imc-cms
>>> list. Check out these two e-mails:
>>>
>>> [1]
>>> http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-cms/2007-December/1231-c8.html
>>> [2]
>>> http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-cms/2007-December/1228-i9.html
>>>
>>> So, we have an architecture design that would make us 100% secure
>>> against server downtime, data loss and server seizures. While this has
>>> been talked about for years, we now have actual software picked out
>>> for all the different tiers and we even have the beginnings of code
>>> prototypes.
>>>
>>> To illustrate how fast we can go on the front-end tier, Simon (who had
>>> never used CakePHP before in his life) learned Cake and implemented
>>> almost all the features of an IMC. It took him about 3-1/2 hours to do
>>> by himself. You can see this prototype online at:
>>> http://indy.anarcho.dk/
>>
>> etc.
>>
>> Let's finally make this happen in 2008.
>>
>> Jay
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Imc-alternatives at lists.indymedia.org
>> http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-alternatives
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