Forum Post: Concept and supporting website to propel the new way forward... looking for a team and feedback
Posted 12 years ago on Oct. 6, 2011, 7:09 p.m. EST by schmico
(9)
from Ivanhoe, VIC
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Hi team,
Congratulations on getting great attention - its just the beginning I feel - but we are making a stand. For several years now, I have been passionately working towards creating social business (from new enterprise and from creating new social elements to existing enterprise). This movement will create the new way.
In the background, my team and I have been developing a concept with supporting website with the goal of promoting idea generation and supporting the actioning of such ideas. Since the movement has grown momentum, I have invested significantly (well, significantly with respects to the size of my wallet, which isnt massive) so that we can get something working that will continue to support the movement.
The supporting mechanisms revolve around a few different elements, but the key one to us is a simple tool for posting your idea or resume so that you can find interns/people to execute your idea alongside you. The deployment of the idea really depends on interest herein. I was hoping that there might be 1 or 2 of you out there interested in spending some time refining it alongside us before having a soft launch and finally a full launch to assist the movement. Please rest assured that I am genuinely trying to help the movement here, there will be no adds or revenue pursuits from the online platform.
I look forward to building something great with you all.
I've been evaluating the following open technology stack, but am no way attached to it. This is for promoting discussion and does not represent an assertion for what should be used, IMHO technology comes after requirements are clarified, I hate to waste developer time!
Drupal (modular extendable portal, PHP centric, huge install base) elgg (open source social networking framework) SQL backend
Between the Drupal modules available (massive library, check it out) and the elgg framework, IMHO there is a significant portion of what would be needed "readymade". This allows custom development teams to quickly refine/customize/create specific tools that adress the more specific needs that will emerge as the working groups mature.
At the same time allowing a large number of desperate solutions to roll out and getting to where the working groups fracture into different toolsets will be a huge loss of resource time and confuse users that have to span the various working groups.
In addition tools like drupal allow custom dev and web designers to work in parallel and come together as a point of integration when ready. The artistic community involved with the movement can quickly build look and feel into frameworks like drupal as well. IMHO this is far safer an approach than to attempt an entire custom dev solution with raw new codebase. We will get hacked into the ground very quickly, we need proven code base that has a great number of eyes on the security side of things outside our efforts to get our tools online.
The goal would be to provide the working groups the tools for managing the message to push to the tools for delivering the message. Providing everyone a recognized place to speak up and contribute is critical.
Providing a sane place for the working groups to drive their initiatives will be critical as well. We can do this while preventing the content from being drowned out by the forum trolls already crowding the message space here.
IMHO the tech team needs to ratify a mission statement around getting things into a manageable/sustainable footprint that will not expose the participants to unnecessary risk, managed by an identified, open group would IMHO be the safest way.
Great thanks to those who can risk everything and have put themselves on the ground at the points of demonstration. We can and will help, and we need you to get your goals and objectives out there in a clear way to allow the rest of the 99% to understand and step up to help making these changes real.
i like it - great work. have added you on skype, lets get things moving
Ok - so this is what we'll do over the next 12 hours:
Refine our message - focussing on ideas to deliver new social business and/or social value generation within business
Add additional functionality - voting/polling mechanism within forums to enable crowd nominated 'best ideas'
Promote connecting mechanisms - we will enable the functilonality for people to post their idea and recruit interns/volunteers to get their idea to action
Have I missed anything?
Duh... sorry I missed this: technical arm is here: http://occupywallst.org/about/ we should probably be reaching out to this team first...
and here
http://nycga.cc/groups/committees/internet/
Another thing to realize is you can break down the functional areas of what you want to deliver into working sub-domains split off your occupywallst.org site... (chat.occupywallst.org, forums.occupywallst.org, etc).
A functioning infrastructure like what schmico is stating is already available can run along side other more specific tools that the working groups want brought online quickest.
IMHO as the working groups identify what is critical, what is needed, and what will be nice to have in general, we can be prepared as a team to deliver quickly.
(I'm trying to figure out if there is a technical working group yet?)
Yes, would love to help, very powerful tools available to help shape a number of things that would help here.
Realize that there are ready-made open source components at hand that can be quickly integrated by html/javascript enabled folks into a professional site very quickly. I already have this online and available to you all within godaddy hosting infrastructure (we dont care about their politics, we will use the infrastructure against their own machine).
Structured nomination and polling of issues Structured forums that allow discussions to be grouped into more specific segments "working group" wiki space for content aggregation and organizing discussion.
I'm an experienced internet tech systems engineer and can assist with getting working prototypes/sites up immediately can support HTML developers who can work within the tools we ahve to get the functions you want online, quickly.
Please let me know how I can assist, obviously we would want to co-ordinate effort based on criterion the steering committees identify to keep the open spirit of the effort intact.
Great - thanks - we are definitely on the same page here. I am also trying to have some forsight with this too - it would be great to build a platform that can support the social thinkers into the future too. Will DM you the site details - feel free to add me on skype (nbyrne85) and twitter (@byrnenick)
http://getsatisfaction.com/occupy
I got an idea that might help the movement! :D The game company Mojang that made Minecraft uses a website called "get satisfaction" for people to address bugs in the game, a FAQ for people that have common questions, and an area to add new ideas! The biggest bugs and ideas and questions can be voted on and pushed up in rank. Occupy Wall st. could use that website to answer common questions to what the movement is and present everyone's ideas that represent the 99%! These things could be voted on and could help shape the main goals in the movement.
If we can not put something together that does this within the occupywallst.org domain, perhaps something like this could suffice. We want to avoid driving traffic to sites that are going to use the banner add revenue for anything other than funding the movement, itself IMHO tho. I mean there has to be some pretty heavy hitter tech people that are willing to help us get this built out (beyond what we can do with the people at hand).
IMHO first step would be to reach out to the working group / comittee structure and see if they have/want a tech working group. And how they want to officially task us.
I would love to work with the people from occupywallst.org and get them involved with the get satisfaction page that i made. I would make the people from this site all mods on the get satisfaction page. I am paying $20 a month to keep it up and i am not looking for donations I just want to help. :) Please join me I just want to help as much as I can from here. :D http://getsatisfaction.com/occupy
good idea
thats a great idea - I can build that immediately into our site if you think that would be useful?
ya man the get satisfaction isn't mine its for everyone in the movement so by all means use it any way you would like to! :D... also yes please
Cool, just looking into it now - will DM you with a link once its built to get some feedback first - you cool with that?
sure just hit me up. I just made the get satisfaction in the last hour and I think it could be really helpful for everyone if people start using it.
http://s11.zetaboards.com/occupytogether/forum/3025699/ the forum here is not moderated and is a giant mess. wheres your site? link us?
I private messaged you the link. Our site is based around moderated forums, groups and the supporting mechanisms alluded to in the initial post
looking forward to your feedback etc
its hard to have faith or energy to go someplace else. i have a very large amount of critical advice to give any such adventure... process, meta process, organizational structures, etc...when will your site be ready?
Thats completely understandable - I could do a hard 12 hours and get something running today, ready for launch.
We didnt think it was smart to only focus on the online aspect, but it sounds like that might be a better way to go about it at first! Given Sgt1Barker's comment
without the online aspect protesting is futile and stupid and pointless and will accomplish nothing. 99 percent? really? its not representing ME...
Ok cool, well thats reinforcing to us that we are heading in the right direction. Will keep pushing the functionality through today and will have something up in 12 hours