Openecology

Welcome

You can check it out the OpenEcology.org Alpha being built here: http://transformativecommunities.com/openecology/

Ted's been hard at work taking this site past the basic 'joomla site' and into a heavy duty collaboration platform. It's basic functionality and structure are in place. There will be lots of tweaks and a design will be added but the platform is working and we can begin using it.

I encourage you to sign up here: http://transformativecommunities.com/openecology/index.php?option=com_community&view=frontpage&Itemid=73

Once signed in, you're single identity will enable you to interact on the social network, forums, CMS system and blog. The system will be refined over the next week so if things seem weird - let me us know in the Bugs area of the forum...

Architecture

Wireframes

OpenEcology v.90

Home is a place for graphical explanations, news, social media, etc. Once you've signed in, you'll also find the Community Management tab come down, which is a light weight project management system (Project Fork) we're considering using to manage the team that maintains/develops the site and online community.

About is static content explaining the effort. I've iFrames (wrapper) relevant info from the wiki into this section. This is only temporary as we'll add this content as pages with graphics and designs over the next few days.

oe Tools (name changed from products/projects) is the main area for accessing information about the tools being created. This is going to be our biggest challenge as we'll need to produce a custom page template.

Community has the following features:

• A social network (jomsocial) that we should start using as our primary communication platform.
• A forum that integrated with the social network and the broader content management system
• The Wiki. Right now it's only a wrapper of the current one but we'll be integrating it into the broader system in the next few days.
• A directory to list the people, places and things in the open source universe.
• Bottom tool bar with chat so you can IM with anyone on the site.

We can use what we like, remove what we don't and change things around. These features are a starting point.

Blogs are narratives from people using oe tools. We recently found a way to place multiple wordpress blogs into the joomla site, which means people have independent wordpress blogs (no reason for everyone who wants to contribute to learn Joomla) within the site that are integrated to the site's other features as well as the other blogs. I think we should encourage key people/places developing and deploying oe tools with us to have their own blogs. We should import the current openfarmtech.org/weblog into the site, rename it factorefarm and have it be our first place/land blog. My friend with land in Pennsylanvia could be a second. As more and more people/places start participating, we can recruit them into our blog network, which will become an exceptional collection of narratives, an awesome media property and source material for people who want to take the insights from the blogs and add them to the wiki, products etc.

Resources is where we can place the most essential and useful pieces of media - videos (powered by jomsocial), books, documents and links. We might want to place the directory here...we'll see how it develops.

Join Us has articles labelled 'opportunities' on the left side. This is where we can post volunteer/job descriptions and the like. On the right side are our social media modules: Calendar, Twitter, Facebook, BEEx. We could also use Identi.ca, which is an open source twitter... what do you think?

Store is a pretty simple application with a shopping cart and many payment options. The product information section isn't very deep. When people want to buy tools section, we plan to link them to the store's page and vice versa.

Things to Do

1. Join the Community: build your profile, add your favorite videos relevant to OE (other than the OSE ones), friend each other and experiment with interacting over the social network and the forum. Once the site is a little more mature and we're all more comfortable with the tools (Monday?) let's invite all the true fans to join.
2. Join BetterMeans: I've invited everyone on this email list to bettermeans which is a project management/consensus based decision making tool. Let's try it out. It might work for us - it might not. Ideally, we'll have a system like bettermeans for internal project management and use project fork (which is in the Joomla site) for the site's management. In other words, people working on making the tools would use bettermeans while people managing the online community, media distribution, etc would use project fork (joomla.)
3. Try out Project Fork: It's accessible as a drop down menu from Home. We'd like to manage the online community with this tool. May or may not work. Let us know what you think.
4. Elect a twitter representative: We should start tweeting. If you know how to use twitter - hashtags and all - then please take over the twitter handle. I'm not a great tweeter but I have some friends who are and it's shocking how well they can work a social networking using twitter. If no one is a good tweeter, we should keep our eyes pealed.
5. Elect a store manager: Someone is going to need to deal with adding products and fulfilling orders. The store app isn't complicated but it does have a learning curve so it would be best if one person was in charge of this, learned the system and managed the store.

In general, let's try and keep discussions away from email and on the forums and social network.

Excited to see you on the site!