[imc-st.louis] Ben's notes on STLIMC website, moving on, etc

[ben]

Apropos announcement of 9/3 media collective meeting that was forwarded 
to this listserv, below are some of my responses to the folks calling 
those meetings.  I had asked that the meeting announcement be sent to 
this list, but do not know why it wasn't.

Other commitments notwithstanding, I will be sitting out on any IMC 
meetings for the foreseeable future.  I am too burnt out on it, and I 
played the role of keeping the project's momentum (not to mention the 
website) running for way too long.  I forward things to this listserv, 
but that's it.

Plus, all the time I spent sitting in on never-ending IMC meetings over 
the years could have instead been spent setting up a digital literacy 
program (with grant-paid staff members) to run out of the computer space 
in 1st floor CAMP.  I would still like to get the digital literacy 
program going, and so I need to make choices on where I spend my time.

For those looking to restart STLIMC, the admin responsibilities
fob website basically boil down to...

1. Check up periodcally on recent contact (visible at
http://stlimc.org/track) for anything that runs counter to posting policy

2. Post and respond to content sent to the editor listserv, or on the
feature section of the website.

4. Approve messages sent to email lists by non-subscribers.  (This is
somethine I've been doing for all the CAMP/IMC listservs for years, and
it's really a daily chore.)

5. Sit on the national editorial IMC list
(imc-us-editorial at lists.indymedia.org) and participate in decisions
about what shows up on http://indymedia.us.  This is optional, but the
national IMC folks would really like the help.  Plus, it would do
wonders to reconnect STLIMC with folks outside of Missouri.

A big problem right now is that website at stlimc.org has a broken
feature section.  The voting function doesn't work, meaning center
column stories must be manually selected publication after voting is done.

Other IMC sites have fixed these problems, so a big task would be to
basically copy the template from those sites onto stlimc.org.  I do not
have a good answer when I may be able to help with this.

If you know of anyone with website/Drupal skills with some time to burn,
I would recommend they subscribe to the lists
imc-drupal-dev at lists.indymedia.org and imc-tech at lists.indymedia.org,
which is where lots of IMC tech folks hang out.

I've been diligent about posting technical details of the stlimc.org
website here, so these would be good reading material for any techies
you may be talking to:
http://stlimc.org/web-tech-todo-reboot.stlimc.org
http://stlimc.org/migration-todo-archivestlimcorg
http://stlimc.org/drupal-development-indymedia
http://stlimc.org/drupal-modules-used-stlimc

Also, here is the link to the Facebook group St. Louis Activist Hub.
I'm member of this group, which is how I've been forwarding their
announcements to the public STLIMC list.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=38547728104

Overall, I'm not bitter about my involvement with STLIMC over the years,
and I would like to see the website continue to stay online (hence my
efforts to resolve the webserver problems).  Many great things have come
from my work on the IMC project, e.g. attending the Nat'l Media Reform
Conference, a grassroots wifi Internet project I'm working on now,
building the computer lab (and hopefully a digital literacy program) at
CAMP, interviewing Carl Kabat, and plenty others.

I simply feel that now is my time to move on.

Peace.

-- 
Ben West
westbywest at riseup.net
http://savetheinternet.org