Improving the Website (+ translation)

Dear fellow comrades,

at our last ISM chat conference on Sunday, Nov. 21st, the point of improving the ISM homepage (http://www.emancipating-education-for-all.org) has been brought up. It has been criticized that the homepage is only fully available in English and too confusing in general.

Therefore, we want to ask you all about your opinion on the ISM homepage.

What can be improved?

What do you like?

Do you have any new ideas for the homepage?

Who wants to help translating and designing?

Give us feedback! You can directly respond to this mail or send your ideas to Mo (united.for.education@gmail.com).

Based on your collected ideas and suggestions we'd like to call for a chat meeting later on to discuss things and find concrete solutions.

Thank you!

Solidarity

Sina

+++++++++

We also ask you to help translate this message into other languages. It would be awesome if you could take 10 minutes of your time to help approaching all activists around the world - no matter what language they speak!

If you have a translation please sent it to sina_reese@yahoo.com (which is me). You can also contact me if you want to have the german version as a basis for your translation.

We're currently having versions in English and German. Once we have collected a few translations I'll send out another mail, providing them all.

Thank you!

Looking for support

Sat, 04/12/2010 - 11:37 — Rob (not verified)

Cari compagni e colleghi,
alla nostra ultima conferenza in chat del 21 novembre si è discusso di come migliorare l'home page dell'ISM.
È stato sollevato il problema che l'homepage è disponibile per la maggior parte solo in inglese e ha un aspetto troppo confuso.
Quindi, vogliamo chiedervi qual è il vostro giudizio sulla homepage del movimento.
Cosa può essere migliorato? Cosa ti piace?
Hai qualche nuova idea per la homepage?
Vorresti dare una mano a tradurre e a fare web design?
Facci sapere! Puoi direttamente rispondere a questa mail oppure spedire le tue idee a Mo (united.for.education@gmail.com).

In base alle idee e ai suggerimenti raccolti vorremmo indire un'altro meeting in chat per discutere e trovare soluzioni concrete.

Grazie!
Sina
(tradotto da Rob)

Sun, 05/12/2010 - 20:38 — Kays

some words

Yeah, I could consider rewind the whole site, due to that everything plugged into one page appears a bit confusing; perhaps it could be possible making a more coherent version.
So here the Pros, what I like: +everything important information I need, is available in my preferred language: english, thogh my father tongue is german. +every type of communication media is here pooled
And the ultra contra: -the work flow is slow: getting to one specific forum page lasts a few clicks nor ... here at the left side bar the calender of events could be formed more attractive.
Myself: I'm able, as far i've proofed with the Reclaim Education, to design and layout something together. Programming a site won't be really my cup of tea (but have some experience). And so far, as I'm in the admin-group, i've don't dared to remove some of these (in my sight) wasty images on the left an right bar, nor to put other content onto the welcome page, like a 'signpost', according that finding the right corner isn't so pretty easy here.
--
wkr Kays

Tue, 07/12/2010 - 17:12 — Jürgen Linder

Team & concept for the Website ...

I think, there should be a special team for "ISM Website Development".

This team should:
- collect ideas and suggestions for improvements
- plan / hold chats and Skype meetings with all team members
- include Web-designers, programmers, reporters, users, ...
- Work out a good concept:
Visual design, Homepage functionality & content, Forms,
Structure, Menu-Options, Languages (what infos in which languages,
what languages should the user-interface be in),
Background funcionality (Mailing lists management, automatic news forwarding, ...)

You see, there is a lot to do, and some experts should get together
and take care of this. It is important to establish some "special interest teams"
that take care of things like this, because not everybody needs to get involved
into planning and developing a new web site, so let it handle some people,
who really enjoy this kind of stuff and who know hto get tis done!

The system used is Drupal, there is in-depth information about it
on drupal.org, this CMS this has many features and options,
just its user-interface is kind of antique and unresponsive ...

My suggestion is to keep "global news" only in English and to
translate "essential local news" into English as well.
Then, we will get the information flowing in English, at least,
because translating is a lot of work!
Local language information is important, however, mostly
on the regional and local levels, of course.
For global exchange, we should better stay with English,
if possible, because English is the most common language.

Fri, 10/12/2010 - 14:30 — Kays

pipl

Do we have such a capacity, don't we? And I disagree with using Skype. However, I'd like to participate. I suggest using an EtherPad. Has anyone experience setting up one? And what about using the CL-network (have only found ther german WP: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/CL-Netz)?
--
wkr Kays

Mon, 13/12/2010 - 07:10 — Jürgen Linder

Sounds great, pipl ...

Yes, Etherpad looks good, I like colaborative environments, where people can work together online and live! We need to work out an overall "communications concept" before we decide about the tools, though. Mo from Marburg, Germany, is now running the website and the FB wall afaik. He is a great guy and puts a lot of hard work into managing all of this, there is a lot of content already on the website.

Some group has to form and decide that they want to work on this concept at first.

We need to answer some important questions:
- What "info" are we dealing with? How much content is already on the website?
- Should a new CMS system replace the existing Drupal website? or can the Drupal-content be managed using another, more user-friendly, collaborative, automated and time-saving production environment!
- Who is working together? - Team and structure building - we are not there yet!
We need to decide at first, what "structure" ISM will use, how people around the globe can share information and work together to produce content, how we connect the teams, how the news-production-process, the translation into local languages, or from local languages into English can be organized effectively! = time-saving, easy-to-use, fun ? for all, logical info- and work-flow.
- How is information flowing? - global, global -> regional -> local movements
- from different info-sources, through a translator
- to ISM
- re-posted on different channels: Facebook, News Agencies, Twitter, SMS would be cool
- Which information channels can we use to spread information to reach many people / mass media!
- New Media: SMS the activists
- Video on the website
- Live streams
- Archive of documents
- Our own video conferences
- ...

The decision which "tools" to use should be second, because the "applications" that we choose should ...
- save us time
- be easy to use
- help us to organize the information flow and
- help us to organize the publishing process
- responsive, like Facebook, using responsive web-technologies (Ajax, Comet, wysiwyg)

So, there is a lot of work to do, if you want to develop a concept - then just do it -

1. Found a new ISM.group called ISM.apps ? or ISM.tech or something (short maybe ?)
2. publish your draft of the concept on the website
3. See if you can get feedback from your team and other experts to see what they think and if the tools, workflow, info-flow, collaboration tools, will work for everybody ...

Hey, I am sitting in Vienna, Mo is sitting in Marburg, so our German is allright, but it makes sense to post in English on the Website so that all our folx can read every content ...

3. The concept should be discussed - also in a chat-forum or hopefully video-conference. Btw, do you know a video-conference-app we can use? Or audio at least? It would also be good if only 3 or 4 people can join a video-conference / -chat! I think it would help if we all could "talk" to each other than only type in stuff, that is sooo complicated and slow. Also, audio communication is much more personal!

See, I am a connector, so my goal is to have easy tools, to build strong teams of reporters, researchers and the tech guys. I am connecting the departments, that is what I do ... And in my point of view, team building has to do with personal contact, we will all work better together if we all know each other and if we talk to each other ...

4. Then, we all start using / promoting the "new environment" and the new tools.

See, there is a lot of work to do, ISM is "under construction", this is a very young platform, and we are still forming the team ... which is also a long-lasting process ...

So, welcome on board, just send your feedback to the board, or write me jurgenlinder@gmail, if you have any feedback or questions about what I think. Also, there is no boss, but Mo is taking care of the site at the moment. I think he could also use some help in maintaining the site, publishing reports of what is going on and more.

I would like to hear some more about how we could integrate our existing content with Etherpad and the CL-network. Do you suggest to replace the web-site, or are these just "additional tools" that we all should use? Have you already used these tools yourself? Did you have good experiences with the user-interface? Collaboration environment? I did not really get it, what the CL-network can do, so what is the cool feature of that? Why is it better to use this? Why do you not like Skype?

And: What can we use instead of Gmail? You know, it is weird to use the email client of the biggest online corp to organize the movement to get rid of it ... You know, the big picture is not only about education!

Ok, soli greetings to you,
welcome to the club,
hope to hear back from you,
peace. Jürgen

Sun, 19/12/2010 - 03:33 — Kays

My cool reply

My communication is subdivided into local groups, regional networx and the globe.
Information flows horizontal and vertical. I don't see any demand, translating a meaningful amount of texts. For me is and will hold forever (american) English as the main communication language (in the internet). So enlighten me about where you're with 17-years not able to talk at least with basic skills. All in one, if there's really something that have to be translated, then let's compound with the consesus to translate only roughly by sense.

You are right, that the decision what the finally used tool is is secondary, but what at all is user-friendly? You've mentioned easy2use, intuitive and productive.
What we are all here doing is producing information. Information, that we're wanted to spread as far as possible over the www. You've got different ways presenting info: in a forum; mailing list, just the plain text via http and so on. Finally we have to do something with a CMS, getting that all organized. Drupal is partially one but what I'm missing is, to configure a gateway to any mailing list nor the usenet ( http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet ), as I like reading/writing news/mails and so on just via one program, my MUA(mail user agent). The source should be have not to be bound to an specific presentation form. Everyone should be free to decide whether s*he is signing into a mailing list, forum nor posts and reads via telnet-session (http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telnet ) .

Everyone should be free founding new groups. ism.admin ism.tech ism.app ism.test could be the first ones.
The website could refer to a framework but in any case howto use this database (authentication, using seperate space for videos/pic's).
A Server just for fun doing a videocon? That's not my part. Maybe we could host on this server a video-conference server, sounds for much maintenanance. Clients are enough out there [ $apt-cache search videocon ].

CL-network. Yeah, i've saw that that is also a subhierarchy in the usenet ( opennewsnetwork.org ) and the content were fine (left-winged). That's such a thing where you can read/write via nntp (smtp?) and http, as I've suggested to do also something like 'em having a "fully" gatewayed databank. But when we're doing smth similiar like 'em, why don't integrate into the same project. ... Ok, there could be some problems.

Skype is a P2P-story. So you're going to make "every" security-precaution senseless. Expecially that Skype's encryption-methods aren't open. That's danger (gov taps wire? (ò.O) ).

GoTo http://riseup.net/
--
wkr Kays

Mon, 13/12/2010 - 07:24 — Jürgen Linder

ISM Visual Design Group formed ...

At the chat-meeting of Dec. 12, some folx decided to found a group that will take care of the visual design of ISM publications from now on. Some of the topics they want to take care of are:
- Logo development for campaigns
- Visual design of the website and other ISM channels
- Poster design
- Design of electronic media
An Email / facebook-wall for the new groups should be available shortly. If you are interested to join this "task-force", then please contact ISM.global, they will connect you directly to our design guys ...

Sun, 19/12/2010 - 13:34 — Mo

How much space would be needed?

Hello everyone,

personally I am not really into all the IT stuff, so I need some support with this.

The ISM website is about to get a new host soon. Can somebody help to estimate how much space we will need in the future, considering that we make at least some of the change suggested above. Will 200mb will be enough?

Mon, 20/12/2010 - 10:24 — Kays

Re: How much space would be needed?

Take as much as possible! But so far, just for a linux and this db should be 5GiB enough. I don't know what your gonna do with'is space. As 200MiB lasted up to day, keep this size. And it's an upper-case MiB, for (Mega-) MibiByte. I don't hope that you meant 200 milli bit. (^.^)
--
wkr Kays

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