[OSCOM] A Proposal for the Future of OSCOM

Hi all,

Most of you on this list for more than a couple of years will remember I 
worked very hard to make OSCOM 3 at the Harvard Law School in 2003 a big 
success. http://www.oscom.org/gallery/oscom-3/

I would like to take up Michi's suggestion of OSCOM 5 in 
Boston/Cambridge next year and propose that it could be the means to 
reconstruct OSCOM as a more sustainable organization representing all OS 
CMS.

I made a list of OS CMS (still part of my CMS Review site) at that time 
and invited all the developers to OSCOM 3.  I propose we do that again 
and this time make room for all of them in the program.

You probably know that OSCOM inspired me to make a bigger organization 
for CM practitioners who work with any CMS, Open or Closed Source, to 
discuss their problems.
http://www.cmprofessionals.org

Over 900 members have joined CM Professionals from around the world (we 
have large communities in Australia, the Benelux countries, Canada, and 
Scandinavia - with small ones in Africa and Japan).

Our CM Pros Massachusetts Community is a strong group that is run by 
David Pearson, who is also the Event Coordinator for the CM Pros Fall 
Summit (in conjunction with the Gilbane Conference).

At the last Massachusetts Community meeting, David described trying to 
get an OSCOM booth at the Gilbane Conference, staffed by our 
Massachusetts Community OS  members.

OSCOM 5 and the reorganized OSCOM could be introduced there.

David is Executive Director of Shawmut Education. I believe OSCOM could 
hire him part time to be the OSCOM 5 Event Coordinator. I would try to 
get Harvard as the site again, but there are many great venues here.

I see the proposal that the next OSCOM have only invited presenters. We 
could try to assure equal time for major OS CMS that way. But David has 
developed a forms-based Call for Papers and a team of peer review 
judges.  OSCOM could do the same to attract the best ideas to the 
conference.

In the last few years I have learned a lot about what it takes to 
maintain a community. CM Pros has a great Membership Directory so people 
can find one another. We have a large number of bloggers whose posts are 
aggregated to our home page. We feature member sites with links on our 
home page. We built a tool to convert our boring Mailman list archives 
to a blog-style web interface. We have a large Resource Library,  a 
Glossary of CMS terminology, a world-wide calendar of CMS Events, and an 
active Jobs Board.

Many of these resources I built with a Creative Commons license and they 
are now syndicated to many CM webistes

I have proposed to Sandro that some of these could be added to the OSCOM 
website and he liked the idea. But we need a working website first.

The CM Pros website runs on multiple OS CMS (all GPL) that are 
integrated by web services, RSS feeds and custom XML connectors.

I propose we rebuild the current OSCOM site the same way, asking each OS 
CMS team that thinks they could add something special to the OSCOM site 
to provide that functionality while following the visual and interactive 
design (look and feel) of the current OSCOM site.

I see Marc Laporte has been prototyping an OSCOM Wiki. We currently use 
his TikiWiki to drive our collaboratively-written CMS Glossary. 
(http://www.cmswiki.com/tiki-index.php?page=CmsGlossary)

My OSCOM CMSML project to allow head-to-head comparison of CMS  has not 
been advanced for a couple of years.
See http://www.oscom.org/projects/cmsml/

CM Pros assumed responsibility for CMSML in November 2004, but we have 
no results to show so far. I would like to revive this project. It is a 
faceted classification system that is much better than the OSCOM CMS 
Matrix. It might be an important alternative to the CMSMatrix.org 
website, which always lists its owners, WebGUI, as the most popular tool.

CMSML output is available as XML and OPML for other organizations to 
take feeds. But it needs a lot of work. The version playing on OSCOM 
could be the subset of OS CMS, but I recommend that we allow head to 
head comparisons with proprietary CMS, because OS tools can hold their own..
________________________________

To do the above things, we need a Board that wants OSCOM to be moving 
again. They need to give approval for at least some of the above 
suggestions and we are ready to start at any time.

Perhaps the biggest and most immediate need is a new website. I 
understand the current version is just an HTML peel of the Midgard-based 
site that we used to edit the OSCOM 3 program (I spent a lot of time 
copying and pasting Midgard GUIDs to link program entries with their 
details).

We now run Drupal, Apache Lenya, Plone, TikiWiki, and other OS 
CMS-related tools at CMS Labs in Cambridge.

I would welcome any OS CMS to install at my lab or maintain their OSCOM 
contribution on their own servers.

The goal is a model OSCOM website that demonstrates interoperability of 
OS CMS, loosely coupled by web service connectors.

I look forward to your criticisms and suggestions.

-- 


Bob Doyle
Editor In Chief, CMS Review - http://www.cmsreview.com
Technology Adviser, CM Pros - http://www.cmprofessionals.org
Contributing Editor, EContent Magazine - 
http://www.econtentmag.com/About/AboutAuthor.aspx?AuthorID=155
President and CEO, skyBuilders - http://www.skybuilders.com
77 Huron Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: +1 617-876-5676   Skype:bobdoyle