[Imc-alternatives] IRC meeting/ Project Direction

[Jay]

Hi Strypey and all,

At 10/22/2008, you wrote:
>Kia ora koutou
>
>There seem to be a number of interrelated things that need to be sorted
>out in a more coordinated way. The exact wording of the editorial policy
>will depend on the moderator functionality the site offers. The
>application of the visual design will depend on certain back-end
>functions being in place. What functions we need will need to be
>separated out and clearly listed, although much of it is suggested by
>the designs Nick has put together, with more detail on our wiki.
>
>To move these things forward, I suggest having an irc chat session of
>the implementation team. I will be flat out with exams and election
>campaign for just over 2 weeks, but after that I can set aside some
>time to work on this. Can we get some indications of who'd like to
>participate in such an irc meeting, and when they are available after Nov 8?

I'd love to be part of that kind of chat and will leap to make my 
schedule work to accommodate it.  The weekly Sunday evening (U.S. 
Eastern time) IRC chats worked wonders when we were talking through 
design issues a few months ago.  We may need to pick a different time 
to make sure everyone can be there, but having a regular time each 
week scheduled to touch base would be really helpful.  We wouldn't 
have to have a full meeting every week, but at least we'd know where 
to find each other on a semi-regular basis.


>Jay:
>On the name AlternativesIMC. Yes, I think since we were fairly evenly
>split between alternatives, and solutions (some us internally split ;),
>it seems sensible to stay with the name that we've been using since the
>start.

Yeah.  The discussion was really interesting and hope all the 
Solutions-philes are comfortable with sticking with Alternatives.  I 
wish we would have found the absolutely perfect title that swept 
everyone away, but in the end I think Alternatives is solid enough.


>Robbt:
>The project has very clear direction, it might help if you read the
>documentation we've assembled on our wiki...
>http://www.openplans.org/projects/imc-alternatives/
>
>...and our networking site on Crabgrass:
>https://we.riseup.net/imc-alt/
>
>Are you aware of all the functions that an IMC newswire needs?
>1) anonymous publishing of articles and comments, with no logging of IP
>addresses or anything else that could identify users
>2) moderators can move articles and comments off the newswire to a
>'hidden files' area, linked from the front page
>
>and some more that are useful:
>4) moderators can promote particularly well-written, and well-researched
>articles as features
>5) moderators can rethread articles as comments (in case someone replies
>on the newswire instead of commenting on the article)
>6) ability for moderators hide articles from the web but keep them in
>the database
>
>There seems to be no way to do 1) on AltIMC.org yet. Can it do 2)? Can
>it do any of 4), 5), and 6)?

Snipping in Robbt's reply:
>We can already do 1- http://alternativesimc.org/node/add/story - if you see
>something
>There is a hidden module developed by MarkB, but a version for Drupal 6
>hasn't been fully released I'll contact him about that.
>
>4 - we can handle that fairly easy using publish to front page
>5 - there isn't anything in drupal to handle this yet, but it could be done
>6 - see 2

I'm glad we'll be able to most, if not all of these things, even with 
a basic site!  Having the ability to do #5 would be really cool and 
would help us keep the newswire clean.


>Nick:
>Would it be possible to begin applying your visual design to what we
>have so far, even if just means starting with the front page, so we can
>start to get an idea what the final product will look like.
>
>If there is no Drupal module(s) that provide the Activist Networking
>functions we want, what about linking to our Crabgrass site on
>We.Riseup.Net, and applying Nick's visual design to it? That would mean
>we don't need to figure out how to migrate that data if we change
>codebases. We just link the new site to the same Crabgrass site.

Though I support the development of Crabgrass I'm reluctant to point 
to it as our networking function, since I still think it's a bit 
confusing to use.  (We should definitely direct people to contribute 
to the internal conversation about building the alternatives site by 
joining the Crabgrass group.)

When I spoke initially with Josh, Aaron and Z from the PhillyIMC 
about doing this in Drupal we looked at various modules in Drupal 
that allowed for the posting of personal profiles.  Maybe offering 
profile pages would be an easy first step toward networking, even if 
there is little communication functionality at first.


>BTW It's really promising to see projects like open source social
>networking tools like Crabgrass, and Elgg emerging. I'm particularly
>interested in the Open Data Definition that Elgg are proposing, and the
>Open Social standard that Google have been working on with a number of
>the mainstream social networking sites. Would email have taken off as a
>tool to the degree it has if you could only email people on the same
>server as you? I think it's an important medium/ long term goal that our
>networking system interoperates as easily as possible with others'.

Yup!  If everyone can network with everyone, everyone will be able to 
network.
Jay

>RnB
>Strypes
>
>
>--
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