[IMC-Tech] Looking forward through 2001

[arthur foelsche]

***disclaimer- this is a long forward looking document that was written late
at night. I'm intending to provoke dialog and conversation, and most
importantly, momentum. This is being cross posted to the editorial list and
process list in order to solicit some opinions from people on those lists
who are not involved on the technical end of things. Please give some of
this stuff some thought, and, most importantly, have a wonderful new year!
****



Looking forward through 2001


Now that the active code has seen more use in the past year than we might
have guessed it ever would it seems like it is a logical time to have a
discussion about where it is we are going with the code that is driving this
media revolution and the other technical assitance that we as the
tech-collective can provide for the indymedia community. I have been
thinking about this a lot and have broken my ideas down into three areas:
meta-tech, active development, tech projects. These by no means define the
limits to what needs to be done, nor are the perhaps all correct- I feel as
though we have had a down turn in the amount of energy being invested into
indy and I am hoping this document will inspire people to re-involve
themselves as well as providing a clear path for newer people to join in.

Meta Tech
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Goals for 2001:

* establish a mission statement for the tech group that supports indymedia
sites
    here's a rough idea that I'm throwing out at 1:12 in the morning:

    the indymedia tech collective is a group of technology activists who
support the independent media center project. The tech collective is
dedicated to and responsible for providing high quality software
development, systems administration, web design, and support for independent
media centers around the world in a participatory and democratic way. The
tech collective participates in the IMC network with a representative who is
elected and responsible to the collective.(1) The collective meets at least
once a month, during a time which is accessible for people active in the
collective, but intending to encourage as many people to participate as
possible 

(1) this needs to be fleshed out, however, since as of yet there is no
global body supporting the network, it is unclear of how we would
participate. However, I think it is crucial that we identify how we will
relate to the greater imc community in our mission statement. Obviously this
is a very rough statement


* establish a clear and transparent mechanism for communicating with the
greater imc community. Based on the assumption that some sort of global
spokes council will be created, I suggest that we have a tech spokes person
who will participate in the global council for six months who is responsible
to the collective. This spokes person can be recalled by a process of the
tech collective. This person is responsible for communicating the needs of
the greater indymedia community to the tech collective and tech collective
issues to the greater community.

* define standards for membership in the technical collective. At this
moment we have had a completely open policy. It is great to have an open
door policy. I think that it will, however, be necessary to define what
constitutes an ability to participate in the decision making processes. I
would suggest that in order to be a "voting member" you need to be an active
participant in the collective for at least three months, have attended at
least three tech collective meetings, and express a clear willingness to
take on and implement decisions. We will encourage open participation
regardless of membership status with the proviso that we can still
accomplish things in our meetings.

* define a decision making process. I would suggest that the indymedia tech
collective operate with the intention of creating consensus around decisions
with the understanding that there are circumstances in which consensus via
electronic mediums can be very difficult, allowing us to use a 2/3 majority
vote when necessary. Our intentions should be always to arrive at the best
possible decision, making the need for voting rare, if at all.

* create a collective "to do" list

* deal with our financial situation. We still have money in the tech
collective. We need to decide how we are going to make use of those funds. I
have suggested in the past that we purchase  items for a "war chest" that
can be moved from mass action imc to mass action imc. These items might
include: a slide scanner, text and web terminals, small dhcp and firewall
server, hubs, wireless gear, a streaming box, laser printer, web cams, etc.
It seems at this moment that terminals, printers and network gear have been
in high demand at mass action imcs as these are pieces of gear that not many
people have.


* writing weekly tech "minutes" to update the indy community with what we
are doing. This is an important job that could rotate through the
collective.

* creating transparent mechanism for dealing with tasks- perhaps creating
rotating "project manager" type duties among collective members.

* creating a clear method for new members to participate in work load

* create a clear policy on passwords




Active development
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First and foremost is the mysql migration. While the postgress situation has
improved dramatically, we still run much higher loads than we need to.

a) information organization. Search Engine!! We need a new
search engine. We need something that can actually access
the content that we have. Since there is no way of exploring
indy other than going through the pages of the newswire, we
need a faster search engine to access our content!
                
i) threaded discussion. While the discussion feature is
great, it would be much more useful if it was threaded
                
ii) content based organization. through a search engine or
a more active editorial team, we need a way to associate
articles and similar content in accessible ways- for example
"show me all articles like this one"
                
iii) differentiation of content type. Not all articles are
the same kind of information. We need to be able to have
different kinds of wires that have different kinds of
articles- editorial, analysis, rant, opinion, humor,
dustbin, flame, advertisement, press release, etc.
                
iv)  user control of ratings and content placement. users
of our sites (IMO) should have the ability to
editorialize both in terms of content, but also
in terms of classification- "this is a great analysis"
"this is a shitty rant"

v) language support: we need to add fields that allow us
to arrange display of the newswire by language with out the
hack that we developed for prague.

b) editing system which allows users to change their articles. Part of
maintaining indymedia as a participatory medium means allowing users to make
changes to their posts. This will also lesson editors' work loads, as well
as encouraging better posts.

c) allow users to do multiple uploads or to link their own stories

d) make the features editing system standard with the following upgrades:
automatic feature archives generation, ability to delete/hide features from
the database, ability to reorder feature sequence, automatic sizing of
pictures, ability to upload pictures, ability to click "translate this
feature" and write a translated version of the feature to the correct
include file

e) write the non-geek's user guide to active



Tech- Projects
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* mail sever: to support people who work on indymedia and to provide for an
alternative to the evil yahoo address that some imcs have used, we should
support imc-workers with email accounts. I personally feel that we should
provide pop accounts- I know that there are some issues with these types of
accounts- perhaps we can work out a deal with Speakeasy to act as our mail
gateway? Not sure- do people have ideas how we can provide a way pop access
with out problems? As an aside- I think having an ability to download and
sort email is essential for dealing with the hundreds of messages a day that
indy list subscribers get. It takes far to long to have to use a web
interface to read list mail. Perhaps we can have rise up provide imap
accounts with a imc specific interface that has mail folders predefined to
imc lists? Don't know, just trying to throw out ideas here.

* collaborative todo list: We need some sort of tool that will allow many
people to work together on projects who are on different continents and time
zones. This would also be a message board where people could pick up tasks
and provide information about what needs to get done. Or trouble shooting
things. While this is done quite well on imc-tech and irc, it would be nice
to have more project oriented things in a specific place that had a better
interface than email

* irc server box- since irc is one of our main communication devices, it is
important for it to not be on a box that has the potential to go down. This
server should not be located at fstv - fstv, regen, philly?

* emergency contact list: a list of the active tech members, email
addresses, and phone numbers, as well as info on servers, fstv, the colo
etc. This should be sitting on a box that is not hosting indy sites as well.
This should have a password maybe?

* install a web based ssh client on our boxes

* develop an indymedia rich media archive - perhaps a script that downloads
all the recent content every week and burns a cd

* make "streaming boxes" which are preconfigured to stream audio or video or
both that can be moved around with ease to different imc projects.

* make terminal boxes that can be used at different mass action imcs or
given to imcs that are in need of hardware.

* develop a stock imc install disk that has basic functionality software on
it for both macs and pcs

* make a few dhcp firewall boxes that can be moved from imc to imc as need
be.

* create an indy development box that has much more open passwords to allow
more people to experiment with the code



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arthur@indymedia.org  email for pgp key   icq:85145792