Re: [ox-en] Website

Hi all,

great collection, Stefan Mn and Mathieu, I will answer on this mail 
here:

On 2009-05-15 14:45, Mathieu O'Neil wrote:
> Re audience I agree with Stefan Mn below: the core message should
> appeal to as many as possib;e; later there could be subpages "for
> hackers", "for academics", "for office workers" etc.

Agreed. I think, it is important to address special groups in 
appropriate ways (later).

> In my view to make the website attractive it would help to have
> regularly updated content and / or interactivity.

Yes, bloglike teasers from new articles and news. Interactivity: 
comments?

> Possibly there could be a [link to a] new featured text on the front
> page each month: this would be a way to rebuild from the ground up by
> re-introducing new and old "important" [ox] texts.

Good idea!

And we could feed the topics from maillist debates into a sidebar. 

> Also I think it would be good to have some interaction where a person
> involved in the theory or practice of peer production responds to
> people / engages in dialogue every month.

This takes some effort to find people being ready to take this "peer 
producer of the month" position, write some overview of the activities 
etc.

Another more relaxed way to do this could be an interview. We could send 
a list of questions (which have to be carefully prepared) to peer 
producers and theorists and present them on the side under special 
category (to be easily find).

> In terms of producing theory I think it would help focus to have some
> clear directions for research e.g.: - what are the practical problems
> faced by peer projects (money, expertise...) - how can can peer
> production be extended?

Maybe we don't need explicitly produce theory, but to collect those 
parts which fit into some Oekonuxian way of theorizing (which of course 
has a less fixed frame).

> Finally I want to raise the question of aesthetics. Evidently for
> StefanMn it is important that the tools used conform to certain
> standards. Another concern is that the website look and feel good.

An important point.

> Now, I just don't have the time to learn reStructuredText. All I care
> about is to have an excellent website. But now we come to the tricky
> question of taste and of what the tsoftware can do. Maybe the easiest
> would be to give examples of what we think are "good-looking"
> websites. The basic form could be a wiki format a la Wikipedia or
> P2PFoundation:
> http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Foundation_for_P2P_Alternatives Or it
> could be more like a magazine with short extracts see for example:
> http://politics.theatlantic.com/

Very promotional:
http://onthecommons.org/

Concervative factual:
http://firstmonday.org/

Maybe someting between these two.

I could imagine having a blog in the front with promoted (existing) 
articles and news, interviews, project-of-the-month etc. and a wiki in 
the back where articles are collected and developed. Alternatively a 
Content-Management-System with such corresponding features could be used 
(like Drupal, Joomla etc.)

Although I like reStructuredText I propose to use MediaWiki in the back, 
simply because so many people know it from Wikipedia (if not using a 
complete CMS which, on the other hand, is more complicate to administer 
and modify).

Ciao,
Stefan

-- 
Start here: www.meretz.de
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