[UCIMC-Tech] Re: new CMS for IMCs.

Thu Nov 8 14:16:05 CST 2007

FYI:

Date: Thu, 8 Nov 2007 09:18:41 -0800
From: ryan <ryan at linefeed.org>
Subject: [Imc-alternatives] Hello everyone!
To: imc-alternatives at lists.indymedia.org
Message-ID: <20071108171841.GA21048 at linefeed.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Hi everyone,

Recently I've been exchanging emails with Sheri about Techmeet 2007, a
month-long conference that just ended. She let me know that this list
(imc-alternatives), with the IMC 2.0/3.0 talk, has started to drift
into topics that overlap with what we talk about in Techmeet and the
accompanying imc-cms list.

So, I thought I would take the opportunity to talk about Techmeet and
imc-cms on this list as well as take on some of this list's motif --
which seems to be a little more personal with people talking about
their experiences, which I guess I would like to do a little.

Indymedia continues to be a phenomenon because it is a huge, diverse,
global network and lots of people have lots of really different
experiences within it.

The background to Techmeet 2006 Sao Paulo, in some ways, includes the
story of *some* of these IMC people's lives and experiences over the
past 7 years -- I can't believe how long it has been -- 7 years now.

The experience of some IMC people (myself included) is that for every
single day of those 7 years, we have been online and available doing
support and maintenance for Indymedia websites. I helped program
sf-active, one of the CMS'es used by many active IMC sites. And every
single day, I am on irc.indymedia.org, talking to the other volunteers
who work every single day doing support & maintenance. It isn't really
an exaggeration to say every single day -- sure, a few days missed
here and there, but for the most part -- every single day. That's
like, 2500+ days.

I often tell people that my Indymedia workplace -- #sfkids and
#sf-active on irc.indymedia.org -- is more "real" than the physical
office I would go to for the various jobs I've held over the last 7
years. And I used to pick jobs based on how easy the job would be to
get away with doing IMC work on the job. I work for myself now, so I
don't have to do that anymore.

A lot of volunteers have come and gone. Some were with us for a couple
years. Some just a couple months. Some only during big events. But
there are some of us who were *always* there. And that's our
experience with Indymedia :) There's more than that -- the protests,
the conferences, the events, the screenings, the media production, all
that too. But there exists a backbone of tecnicos who keep this stuff
running.

And, actually, almost every day there *is* something going on. People
come with support questions. People come because somehow their IMC
site got broken. We deal with hack attacks. We deal with spam attacks.
We deal with network problems. And that's just the day-to-day stuff.

So at Techmeet 2006, a lot of us who have worked together like this
every single day finally got to meet each other face to face for the
first time. As you can imagine, after 6 years of daily contact,
meeting like that was a profound and incredibly fun time :)))))

At Techmeet 2006, a lot of the core sf-active developers were there
and a lot of the core mir developers were there. These are the two
main IMC codebases. Over the years, there has been a tongue-in-cheek
rivalry between the two so there was fun with that. For instance, we
all watched a FIFA World Cup match between Italy (IMC Italy runs sf-
active) versus Germany (IMC Germany runs mir) and we drank like fishes
and the developers from the respective codebases bet the restaurant
bill on the game :) --- Italy won, BTW :))))

I say all this just to give you a sense of what it was like. More
relevantly, at this meeting, we decided that the lives for these
"every day" technical volunteers had to change. We couldn't keep being
the only ones doing this. We had to distribute the work load more. We
need more people taking money out of their pockets when financial
emergencies come up.

We talked about this endlessly and from every possible angle. And we
decided that we would take proposals back to the sf-active and mir
groups and propose a grand merger of the two development teams. We
would find an existing CMS with an already large codebase, we would
adopt it and make it work for Indymedia sites, and we would all start
working for the same cause. Just this alone would give us a big enough
development pool to make our lives a lot more sane -- and we figured
that the momentum from all this would get more people involved, which
has proven out to be true.

But this is no easy task. We had to consider all the requirements. We
had to evaluate the dozens and dozens of CMS'es. We had to find the
top contenders and push them harder. So Techmeet 2006 ended and we
announced our work on every major Indymedia mailing list, asking for
more people to join our effort, and get the job done. And a lot more
people did join the effort and we did our work on the imc-cms mailing
list.

But then something horrible happened. Actually, two things. First, it
was announced that ahimsa was not going to continue hosting Indymedia
sites. Second, it was announced that CCCP (where linefeed, stray, and
a whole bunch of IMC sites are hosted) was closing. This meant that in
a given timeframe, almost every IMC site would be offline. It was a
huge crisis. And we had to respond to it.

The crisis was resolved by even more time and labor spent, even more
money out of pockets (although it should be noted that the Global IMC
Fund also helped, which is great), and even less time available to
spend on the imc-cms project, which is the long-term solution for all
of these problems.

The crisis was resolved and the IMC sites didn't actually ever go
offline. A core group of "everyday tech people" from San Francisco
started a NEW tech co-op, San Francisco Community Colocation Project
(www.sfccp.net) and that has now been hosting IMC sites for going on a
year in January. Other folks put in their sweat and time and money to
set up new servers that helped with the rest.

It took months of hard work and coordinating to solve that crisis. A
lot of people probably don't even know how close we came to just not
having an Indymedia network anymore.

With the crises more or less resolved, we headed into the time for
Techmeet 2007, which we had decided would be "distributed." We had
little Techmeet's in cities all over the world, over a period of 4
weeks, with weekly audio/video conferences from IMC's from all over
the world. It was really cool and really inspiring. Some of the audio
and video is going to be released soon.

On the imc-cms front, the Techmeet participants reviewed the research
that was done over the previous year, albeit hindered by the
aforementioned server crises. You can see this summary here -
http://www.techmeet.org/txt/CMS_Summary

After reviewing all the research, it was generally decided by that
group that we would take roughly 2 months to intensely evaluate 3
different approaches to a new CMS that we'd all work on together:

1) Drupal-style PHP CMS program - specifically, Drupal
2) Python-based app server type CMS - specifically, Plone
3) Rapid app development from scratch CMS - specifically, CakePHP

It was decided that for a month, we would do a complete analysis of
the 3 approaches. And around the beginning of December, we would
compare these deep analyses and decide what other info we need to make
a decision. Then, we spend December coming up with that data/info, and
we make a decision about which CMS to go with on January 1, 2008.

There is a lot of momentum around this entire 2-month project, you can
feel the excitement about it in the "irc air" (a strange virtual world
we exist in). I am involved in the eval group for #3 and we're meeting
on Saturday morning. Eval group #2 is meeting soon, I forget when.
Eval group #1 is already underway with the existing efforts to create
an indymedia that sits on top of Drupal.

We held an sf-active meeting the other week and we were talking about
this and someone said that they had seen a lot of "next-generation
indymedia" projects being talked about over the years. And that they
come and go and don't amount to anything. And I realized and said that
the difference here is that this effort is, in large part, started by
this group of "everyday tech people" for Indymedia. And we are doing
it because we NEED a change in our lives. We NEED to do this a
different way, we NEED this new cms project to succeed and happen --
quickly. Because when it's successful, which it will be, our lives
will be dramatically improved.

And we know what it means to build, operate and maintain this
software. We deeply understand the technical challenges that are faced
after 7 years of experience. We know what the problems are that we
need to fix. We know it and deeply feel it every day.

Anyway, it feels good to talk about these experiences and have a forum
for this. I hope that everyone here checks out Techmeet, and what
we're doing with imc-cms, and gets involved and helps out. You don't
need to be a techie. We need user feedback, we need admin feedback, we
need documentation, we need alllllll kinds of help in doing this.

Also, none of this e-mail really addresses something else I'm
passionate about right now, which is improving the quality of Indymedia
websites to surpass the web 2.0 commercial sites which have been
coming out. I live and work in the center of the web 2.0 industry and
it really irritates me because indymedia was one of the first web 2.0
sites, and we innovated on that a lot, and we CAN be the innovators
again, outpacing the commercial sites that are out there, who are
stealing *our* great idea that people had way back when IMC was born.
A new IMC with a big development team that leverages an even larger
development team (by going with an established codebase rather than
totally writing from scratch) is exactly what we need to create these
innovations. And that's exactly what those of us who have been working
on Techmeet and imc-cms intend to build.

Looking through this list's archives, I see a few ideas and some
projects, and I'm hoping that people who are passionate on here can
find a way to work with us on this project. Phily's Drupal efforts
seem a perfect example.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. If you read this long, thank you :)
-ryan

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End of Imc-alternatives Digest, Vol 44, Issue 1
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