Re: [Libreplanet-dev] elgg site for testing

[John Sullivan]

Peter <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thursday 05 March 2009 21:38, John Sullivan wrote:
>> Graziano has been kind enough to put up a test Elgg site for us to look
>> at.
>>
>> http://www.sorbaioli.org/gnubook/
>>
>> Check it out and see what you think.
>
> Its a start, but not what I expected.
>
> Not sure what you're aiming at for FSF Groups. My view of FSF groups is an 
> internal network that tunnels through the internet. Each group has irc, news, 
> mail, ftp, http, and admin servers. Local members access their group servers 
> which transfers info throughout the network. The admin server handles 
> membership, projects, activities, donations, etc. - like a ngo. Members 
> belong to two groups, a member of a parent group, and an associate of a child 
> group. Thus a member can access the group's parent server (as a member), and 
> the group's server (as associate member). This creates a member tree 
> structure rooted at FSF's group members. All this is designed to achieve the 
> following objectives:
>
> 1- Market the FSF movement.
>
> 2- Change software legislation.
>
> 3- Recruit new members.
>
> 4- Create groups.
>
> 5- Teach members how to do 1 - 5.
>
> The LibrePlanet website is intended to achieve the first three objectives. It 
> acts as the FSF groups' public relations, news media, and recruiting centre. 
> The last two objectives are handled by 'internal' servers and admin software.
>

This sounds basically right to me, except that I think maybe there is a
little confusion. The site is currently called groups.fsf.org, but the
idea is that this is turning into LibrePlanet. So LibrePlanet is not a
subset of FSF groups -- they are one and the same. If anything, the
relationship runs the other way. LibrePlanet is the umbrella. But I
agree with your list of objectives there.

I think this maybe means you should revisit some of the structure you've
been doing lately, with the FSF Groups namespace? I don't think we need
that. 

> 5- The program developers are pro FSF.
>

I don't want to get too hung up on this issue. Free software is free
software, and we should use it the way we want to use it, even if the
upstream developers have some different ideals. Most of the FSF runs on
Python; I don't see a problem with that. PHP is a downside to Mediawiki,
but our sysadmins are coming to terms with that, and we do have another
major project already (DbD) that is PHP. The important thing is that the
software be well-supported, so that we don't have to overtax our own
resources or volunteer resources in order to keep it running. Mediawiki
certainly is that.

> Normally, I have no objections to using open source, but here we are really 
> focusing on free software, so any hint of reliance or association with open 
> source will reduce our message. If ever we want to separate ourselves from 
> the open source objectives, it is in the software we use.
>

We work with open source people all the time. That's fine, because to
the extent that they are producing freely licensed software, they are
doing good work. We just use that software toward a different objective,
and that will be plain to anyone visiting LP. We shouldn't be afraid of
collaboration; the goal is to avoid confusion and equivocation between
the two groups.

> If we use both elgg for internal use, and mediwiki for public, then perhaps 
> we 
> can do some backend magic to integrate the two programs and provide a simple 
> interface for members. The downside is they use different languages, which I 
> am not geek enough to be enthusiastic about ;).

AIUI, Elgg does work with Mediawiki already. But, the consensus seems to
be that Elgg is not right for us at the moment. There is a lot of
momentum happening on the wiki right now coming out of the conference
and I think we should just continue running with that. Structure will
arise out of the wiki, so we can keep an eye out for that happening, and
periodically consider whether we want to shift to a different platform
to facilitate that.

Thanks for all the thoughts on this.

-- 
John Sullivan
Manager of Operations
GPG Key: AE8600B6