[IMC-US-tech] Greetings and first thoughts

[Ana]

Hi y'all

my name is Ana and i am with the NYC IMC. I am nothing short of 
extreeeemly excited about this project. And I could go on forever about 
why I think it is so crucial to changing the political dialogue in this 
country. But Ill spare you, for now. :-)) This email will be long 
enough with my thoughts on what I think it should look like and 
function as.

First off, I am not a techie. And I havent had too much experience with 
using codes other than Active 0.0. (yes, painful!)

  I did spend quite a bit of time on the Cancun site however, which runs 
dada, and as a user i can say it was a pleasurable experience. (I have 
no idea what the navigating the back end is like.) I especially liked 
the media gallery and the categorized newswire. But the features column 
seemed pretty useless to me and the design was way too busy for my 
taste. How easy is it to take an existing code like dada and tweak it 
to our tastes? is that something we have energy for at all?

The four most important things I'd like to see in my dream us.indy site 
are:

- a tailored design for a (hopefully) tailored code
- a manually uploadable features column much like the global site
- a newswire that syndicates features from all participating IMCs
- a categorized newswire (news, commentary, announcements, etc)
- a categorized archive by issue (environmentalism, racial profiling, 
war on the poor, prison industrial complex, etc)
- a media gallery (much like cancuns's with easy to find rich media 
files) or pages dedicated to inter-imc video, audio, photo and print 
work
- a chat room
- a calendar
- a "how to get involved in or otherwise support your local imc" 
directory
- a links page to non-imc radical media groups

The #1 most important thing is what the features column looks like. If 
its an automated thing then I dont think it will be very effective. I 
know I never look at center columns that auto-generate. To me, one of 
the best characteristics of indymedia sites are the hand-made features 
that draw the reader in, and, with the use of hyper links imbedded in 
the text, are able to connect the dots between seemingly disparate 
issues. For example, how does the patriot act effect librarians, drug 
dealers, immigrants and plowshare activists all in the same breath? 
You'de be hard pressed to find any one article that does that anywhere. 
But you can find it on a feature on the global page because of our 
crafted hyper-linked text. thats the kind of stuff id like to see us 
producing on our front page, always linking back to local IMCs or other 
independent organizations putting out crucial info.

So, those are my thoughts to throw out there as a starting point. Id 
love to hear what other visions are out there and what is technically 
possible with what we got.

thanks!
ana