United States Social Forum Tech Team Discussion

Again, I'm just absorbing the wonderful discussion...

The USSF is nonhierarchical, more of a gathering than conference

explicitly 2 years ago WSF pushed for regional social forums worldwide

USSF a result

regional committees for US
like seven regions

social forum process: creating a space for people to self-organize
designed to accommodate a lot of people

WSF has had 10,000 to 50,000 participants

been interesting to try to transplant into United States

just a space, does not have its own stances at this time

'a process not a place' -- an ongoing conversation

We were a group of people who would like to get involved. Two weeks later--

Here's the keys.

Working together with people on projects
put technology together

real goal is to create a network of people great at working together
not just to create a web site

reorganize the way activists who are technologists work with activists who are not technologists

something very appealing to me we are already adopting the goals of social forum

not all working for one organization, we just want to work on this

Building a national group: involving people who aren't in NYC, so they feel just as involved and engaged

Topics:

1. Committing to a tool (Drupal)
2. Building a national group (SILC)
3. Adding new members
4. Developing technology as an organizing strategy/outreach
5. Developing good relationships between technologists and organizers / Recognizing political role of technology in organizing
6. Project Managemet with complex project and volutneer labor/promotization
7. Quickly develop ways of intaking and processing user data (CCK)

We spent a lot of time trying not to commit to Drupal.

Drupal is a great tool, but sometimes I feel like I'm holding a hammer and looking for nails.

CMS will affect so much of what we're going to do. But needed to use the tool, Drupal, to get to point of being able to make a group decision

WSF Plone site

real only reason we had this conflict is because we started late in the game
stuff we needed immediately

for counter-convention we had year lead time and went months without writing a single line of code, which allowed us to reach consensus

We were tasked with providing organizing infrastructure and web site publicity
our sense as activists was an interest in getting a conversation going at the social forum itself, and doing some technology education

mobilize people to think differently about technology

what we've been asked to do:
* rideboard, housing board
* submit proposals
* generate calendars
* online registration
...

ICT is the only entirely non-staff USSF working group

lots of other people have organizations that have told them to spend time on it

and we're doing it after hours

they would love to have a full time tech staff in Atlanta

I firmly believe that the model we are developing for them will serve them far better in the long term

a lot of stuff we need to do doesn't have to happen in real-time chat

You're in the same room, you do talk, but the rule is it has to go on SILC to be an real part of the meeting

We don't have e-mail notification
That RSS feed is ugly, I'd rather see the threaded comments

[me: could we do workflow/actions here]

project management in this collective structure
are you using project management tools?

Every task and need can be assigned to people.

But really in project management there are all sorts of things people can say-- work X hours on a project estimated to take XX hours.

And then there's task dependencies.

We'll be really testing the limits of CCK. We may feel the need for this, we may not.

We can relate tasks to each other, it's not at the level of a decent bugtracker

We haven't gotten a resource tracking component, how much time is something estimated to take; and especially the accountability issue

Open task has an owner, but has been open for two weeks

Conceptually in any project management you have a critical path

Gant charts: project management tool where you break down tasks into how long you think it's going to take

bug-check-- this person can't work 70 hours!

critical path, shortest path that needs to be done-- anything delayed on the path delays anything else

various software will produce Gant

Task on y, time on x axis.

Project management software is great for individuals up to large projects.

I use them sometimes when I'm the only person working on a project.

I use them to manage multiple projects, I can Gant all of my projects as separate critical paths with their own milestones and deadlines

I don't use any particular software religiously
I use "Projects" (Windows)

falls into category of --- we're still ad hoc enough to be sort of functionally aware of accountability

We don't have any deadlines

That's where Gant is really useful to agree to clear project management plan with deadlines, milestones, dependencies, critical tasks

Path to completion or success could make a huge difference

We could use help communicating with Atlanta

I honestly believe groups always need structure. Structure doesn't have to be bad.

As we've gone through building a CCK system, I've felt there

Two elements we're talking about:

Building the structure culturally, took two-and-a-half months

'should I just create this or bring it to the groups'

I think there are tons of tools
tool fails miserably because we don't have the other structure
it helps to have specific log

certain things groups have to go together

echo sentiment that it sounds like a good idea, not just for us but for reaching out to nontechnologists
help them understand where we're coming from

there may be tasks that aren't technical-- we need a logo

rumblings of Drupal shops creating a project management / task / client management thing in Drupal

[Me: and then it can be extended for any project by any people who give a damn (PWGD)]

Sunday meetings

How to involve new people, but not give just anyone admin privileges

My dream would be to develop the tools to let designers contribute and let people vote on the themes

Communications committee put out a call for designers in general
two didn't respond
third said "only if exclusive"

Time and resources as usual the problem-- need materials, don't have time or money

lot of work duplication
fundamentally a problem when work done for free isn't valued

'We're willing to do this work, but we want a portfolio piece-- that the USSF liked it and used it'
That's they want to be the designers

[discussion about possible cultural differences between coders, in collective and collaborative work, and designers. I pointed out that sharing concepts and CSS was all part of the game for designers too.]