[Imc-india] Help wanted - comment on site redesign

[Vickram Crishna]

As you probably know, the volunteers who host our site for us were 
forced to move servers last year, and this meant a change of server 
software as well - it was quite traumatic, as none of us had hands-on 
experience in any of the new software choices. Fortunately, indymedia 
tech volunteers from all over the world stepped in and helped us make 
the transition, and we owe them a kudos. We also merged the Mumbai 
IMC site with India IMC during this phase, as it had lost its admin 
volunteers and was floundering without any support. This is a shame, 
because it represents a step back for the IMC movement, but if we had 
not done it, the Mumbai IMC movement would have lost its way 
completely.

We are in the process of modifying the look and feel of the site. 
Please take this opportunity to visit 
http://india.mir.dnsalias.net/en and have a look for yourself at the 
direction in which this is going. Post your comments to the list, 
please, so that everyone has a chance to experience the reaction.

The page you will see is a demo, and is not cast in stone. The links 
are not finalised, nor is the content or appearance on subsequent 
pages, so please do not waste time following these now. When we have 
some consensus on this look, we will work on the link pages and let 
you know (here) that they can be viewed meaningfully.

Your site has very few active volunteers to work on administrative 
issues - too few, actually. Training of new admins has also been a 
major resource constraint. For members of this list who have offered 
in the past to step in and help with site administration, do bookmark 
this url, because the demo site will from now offer a place to 
conduct technical training and experiment with static content for 
member's approval. We hope to bring more of you into the loop over 
the next few weeks, and this will not only ease the burden but put us 
in a much better position to encourage more IMCs to come up in India.

We see this as making way for more local flavour not just for 
publishing in English, but very importantly, in regional languages. 
The new server software supports display in fonts from dozens of 
languages, and some of the major Indian languages already have such 
fonts available, while others are under development in universities 
and voluntary organisations. It also has several wonderful features, 
such as machine translation that will make it much easier for 
articles to appear simultaneously in more than one language when they 
are posted (provided of course the author thinks that this is 
relevant, and the admins agree, too).

Of course publishing in different languages also means the site has 
to appear natively in the chosen language. This is an exciting 
opportunity for volunteers to come in to make the site ready for a 
more proactive and inclusive infrastructure for open publishing from 
India. This may seem a bit idealistic to announce at a time when we 
are strapped for volunteers to help even in English, but I am sure 
that many of you have not come forward only because you do not feel 
comfortable enough with the language. You also probably feel that the 
site today does not sufficiently support a local people's movement 
because it is not in the local language.

We look forward to an active discussion on these points.

-- 
Vickram