[Imc-alternatives] implementation team activate!

[ryan]

Josh Marcus wrote:
> adapt drupal to the needs of an IMC site.  This project has some special 
> challenges: in particular, I think we're going to need to think about 
> how to flesh out the "Network" section (which features user profiles) 
> within the drupal framework.  But the implementation seems both 
> interesting and achievable!

Hey everyone:

I've been sort of following the imc-alternatives list and watching as 
progress moves ahead. Jay & I had talked about the intentions of 
imc-alternatives a while ago and realized that imc-alternatives and 
imc-cms share a -lot- of the same goals.

The imc-cms group has been working for a while on evaluating technology, 
looking at different ways to create a scalable, "police-proof", 
"hardwarefailure-proof" system that will survive the ages and we're 
about to start putting together a prototype of that tech.

In case you don't know, the history of the imc-cms group began in 
mid-2006 when a bunch of core Mir developers, a bunch of core sf-active 
developers and bunch of other Indymedia people met in Sao Paulo, Brazil 
to discuss how we could lessen the workload we all shared on maintaining 
IMC servers, how we could mitigate the risk of security violations (like 
what happened to the autistici servers), how we could lessen the impact 
of server seizures by the police and how we could lessen the impact of 
sudden withdrawals of technology donations (like what happened with ahimsa).

Well, I think we've come up with that way. It's mostly documented at 
http://dev.bunke.indymedia.org/

Last year, we held a "distributed" Techmeet which consisted of many 
little Techmeets all over the world -- at least a dozen or so cities 
participated -- and we met virtually, on IRC, through video 
conferencing, etc. And we continued to develop our technology plans there.

This year, Techmeet will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and we are 
currently organizing the callout for that. It will be held the first 
week of September in Rio and we'd love to get other people involved in 
the process -- either physically there in person or virtually.

I don't think it will be THAT long after that that we implement our tech 
solution that's been developed. And we'll begin by approaching Mir and 
sf-active sites and convincing them to switch over to the new software. 
So, I think it'd be interesting to see how imc-cms and imc-alternatives 
converge.  -ryan