[OccupyComms] Website suggestion.

[OccupyBrighton-Info]

Occupy website.


Hi, I though it would be good to try and spec out how an ideal official 
occupy website for the UK and Ireland should function, what it should 
achieve and what its aims should be.

This is not comprehensive and is just a stating point to spark debate 
and with the aim of making an attractive, informative and a powerful 
tool to get the message out to the people and bring about change.

Aims of the website:

Firstly I think the site should work well as a 'first point of contact' 
where people feel confident telling people to visit the site for more 
information, no matter what sort of information they require.

It should attempt to aggregate all the information from all the local 
and international groups. Allowing you to easily see the local picture 
along with national and international overviews.

There should be a huge media archive with videos, audio and images about 
the occupy movement and its issues. Either held locally or externally.

There should also be a comprehensive bookmark catalogue with links to 
external content about the occupy movement, e.g. social media pages, 
websites, blogs and articles, as well as links to content about the 
issues, e.g. Books, websites, audio and video content.

A fully featured calendar would be needed that must be able to display 
events and meetings for occupy groups, and other groups not directly 
associated with occupy. For local, national, regional and international 
events. These need good tags to be able too search and filter the info.

A good use control panel where you can set up preferences to customise 
the data displayed and filter the content if required.

There should be areas dedicated to projects. These can be projects like 
'crowd sourced' books, music, video and information gathering to bring 
together creative people and generate content to spread the message. Or 
it could be a 'working group' project space to enable communication, 
sharing, organising and linking up with other groups. These should be 
flexible and include options like blogs, mini forums and chat type 
functions as required.

It would also be good to have a centralised document archive with copies 
of official occupy releases, meeting notes, agendas and the like. This 
would provide a good backup of this locally held information and may 
help standardise the format of this data, making it easier to track 
trends and make sure widely debated topics are represented.

We will need user groups. You will need top level admins who can do just 
about anything. You will also need content approvers to moderate spam. 
These moderators need to be able to be easily assigned areas of the 
website they can moderate. For example a moderator of a project should 
be able to grant others to moderate that project our any individual sub 
section of that. Changes made should be non destructive, reviewable and 
undoable. Users should also be able to join and leave groups, 
newsletters and updates.

There should be a centralised forum for discussion as well as smaller 
sub forums integrated into areas of the site. Along with this there 
needs to be a good way of finding external forums that are dedicated to 
particular topic or area. Maybe along with a feed stream from both local 
and external forums.

There should be a good RSS system that allows you to both subscribe to 
feeds from the website's areas as well as a system to help people find 
and subscribe to external feeds.

Finally there is the news section that should pull in occupy news, 
related news and opinions from occupy groups, national news, independent 
blogs and news from NGO's, charities and pressure groups.

Platform, hosting and administering the site.

The best choice of platform would be use an existing open source platform.

Possibly the Drupal platform may be the most flexible and powerful 
platform at the moment, but it has a steep learning curve.

Ideally the website should be able to work on distributed hardware with 
built in redundancy. This would make it scalable as well helping spread 
the load and costs. This may be a long term goal though and a single 
server solution may be better to start with.

We would want to run the site as its own open source project. This will 
help with keeping it documented, track changes and allow other to reuse 
the platform elsewhere.

Administrator changes need to be non destructive where possible and 
tracked where ever possible. Only code updates that have been approved 
on the main open source branch should be made on the live site.

Hopefully we can use many already created open source tools and our 
platform will mainly be a documentation of which tools used and how to 
make them work together.

Phase one:

To start with I think we should create a good design brief from hardware 
requirements, storage required, backend platform, mods to use, 
functionality, menu structure, design template, management structure and 
code release/ testing plans.

Please feel free to share and discuss this.