Activism Network - Progress Report

ActivismNetwork.org is winning the poll. At 48% of the votes it has a substantial lead over MovementIsPower.org

My early favourite, FromBelow.org, is last place. Obviously the general readership doesn't read lengthy sectarian and anti-sectarian texts on how building socialism from below is the way to go.

I really really really wanted activism.org but Wendy Russ has it. What is really funny is that she was using it to hold an annual "Clean up the Internet" day where people were meant to remove old pages. So there she is, sitting on a really nice domain name, and not using it.

I'd tried emailing her a couple times to see if she'd let me have the site (I suspect she is slightly liberal) - but she hasn't responded. You can email her too and lobby on my behalf.

Besides choosing a name, I should be writing code, uh right? So the code is doing ok. I slowed things down when I decided to rewrite major sections of my program so that they would be more logically structured and thus easier for me and other people to understand and modify.

At this point, I'm not making any promises about when it will be ready. If you are interested in being a Beta Tester, email me. The Beta will be out sometime in the next several months - depending on how good I try to make it.

I'm unsure as to whether I should try doing a dual-release of both a CivicSpace/Drupal and independent client at the same time? Or should I just focus on releasing one of them? For that matter, I'm not sure about supporting CivicSpace/Drupal because if I
support it I should go all-out and use all of the Drupal features that I can use. Whereas I'm currently just doing a very dirty integration, where I get my software to run on Drupal "By Any Means Necessary". It runs on Drupal - but it only uses Drupal for some of the navigation between pages. For instance, it doesn't use Drupal for feeds, or even logging in.

For that matter, I cannot quite figure out what CMSes (like Drupal) are for. What kind of social change comes from a bunch of privileged people writing blogs? People need to meet face-to-face AND they need to attend trainings to get skills. Without skills they're doomed to years of feeling ineffective.

I'm not sure how much customization I should put into the first release of the "Activism Network" software. I could allow for people to add an organizational logo, site title, choose which features to support (groups, people, events, resources, etc), and to filter their site by area, campaign, issue, network, or other criteria.

At some point I just need to release software so that it can create enough buzz that I'll find some people who are willing to volunteer on the project, or some people who'd fund it and then I could hire some people. It'd be nice to have another full-time person.