community

A Software Development Program

PRADSAX the software development programme is an
effort to create the new software tools that are needed to support our
eXchange activity. In a world of mashups, open source and web 2.0 and
with our limited resources, we want to re-use not re-invent. In a world
of agile software development, we want to start by implementing the
scenarios and user-strories that gives us the greatest additional value
for the least developer effort.

An Engaged Community

Ultimately, PRADSAX will succeed of fail because
of people engaging together. Our community is interacting, discussing,
debating, designing and developing on-line and face-to-face. We are
meeting here at www.technologyandsocialaction.org, in a googlegroup pradsa@googlegroups.com, on del.icio.us (using the PRADSA and PRADSAX tags, and other tags) and elsewhere. If you share our vision, come and join us.

An Action Research Program

This program is both action (we want to create a
system) and research (we are trying to investigate a general question
about designing technology in 21st Century social action contexts).

Our (initial) question is:

How do we go about designing new e-practices in the space of technology and social action given:

We start tomorrow at Margrove Park. There's no plan. We'll just react to what atendees want to do and provide the vehicle. For the next 6 weeks there'll be an informal drop in between 4pm and 8pm.

They're sure to want to recap on how to edit their website www.margrovepark.com but we can now also offer email accounts of name@margrovepark.com courtesy of google apps. I've made this a link from the website called "Intranet". I couldn't thing what else to call it and if people personalise it to utilise document sharing etc then it really will be an Intranet.

After the early frustration with Google Apps I've now found it much easier to set up new accounts. Perhaps too easy, I manage around 200 domain names and they're all just pointing to community websites and projects with no email associated with them.

I just set up a new instance for www.saltburn.org.uk but I only altered the MX records so google apps is only providing email on the domain name. The domain name is still pointing at the original website. This means that email accounts can be provided for project staff and it also creates a kind of "Intranet" of apps e.g. http://partnerpage.google.com/saltburn.org.uk that each user can customise.

This opens a whole range of possibilities - for instance what could we do with www.skinningrove.tv www.margovepark.com www.ts3.org.uk www.hfhc.co.uk (and many others) At fist my intention with this pilot project was to pull all the participants together under the google app running at www.myweb2.org.uk - now I don't know, perhaps it may be better to introduce different groups to stuff running under their own community domain and find some way of linking them up.

Some sessions are due to start in Margrove Park. They're I'm trying a new approach there which is even more informal than before. It seems to me to be the most likely to work. I blogged that proposal here

Those sessiosn are now going ahead so we could introduce participants to a email@margrovepark.com concept.

Hey, google apps finally verified the domain MyWeb2.org.uk - I remain slightly unconvinced. It's a convoluted mess of stuff - slightly kludgy. I do somewhat prefer the iGoogle approach of bring google gizmos together. I'll stick with it a while. Guess I need some early testers to give it a whirl. I think the problem with this "make it easy one size fits all" is you lose the ability to give your users custom vehicles put together with HTML etc. I may be wrong about this and I'm currenly experimenting.

(expensive) typo when registering the domain name. I registered three but two have the typo and (surprise surprise) they have all since been snapped up. However this tells me why the domain has not been verified yet. Sorry google. The Google Apps part of the project will now run on myweb2.org.uk

Margrove Park Website

Margrove Park Website

This could bring out first participants. I went to the Village Hall at Margrove Park yesterday to talk about some new workshops within the SID project.

I proposed some sessions (see below). I mentioned Web2 for older people but the only bit they understood was "older people", a description they said applied to them. About half way through teh sessions I think they'll begin to understand and we'll get our participants then.

Marian,

From the notes you gave me at the Village Hall I propose the following idea:

To run club type sessions from 4pm to 8pm on Thursdays (we'll arrive at 3pm)

We'll spread out laptops so people can do a variety of things

Basic IT
Email
Updating the Margrove Park website
Using the website to contact us and receive support
Images, scanning etc
Anything else

Sessions to start August and run for 6 weeks on Thursdays after which we'll review what is needed

Still trying to verify the google apps account. Google are so hard to deal with with days between emails. I want to change the account to an educational account but somehow I have managed to convince google that www.tvcm.co.uk is an educational institution but not www.myweb2.com - not sure how I did that.

I could discount google as a source of web2 apps to engage people with but it's hard to ignore them. I have an inkling that this will work better if we try wherever possible to stay with one "brand". This means we could draw upon:-

Google Apps
iGoogle
Google Mashups
Picassa (need to run a comparison with Flickr)
Youtube (inc YouTube editor)
Google Docs
Blogger