SCN: Webteam meeting report - SCN update

[patrick]

Last night, the SCN webteam had a meeting at the lovely Taco Del Mar
in Greenwood. 

In attendence was Lisa Nardi, the new Seazine editor; Lois Beetle,
the topic editor for the Spirituality page (and who claims to know
something about HTML - that was a joke); and myself.

First, I want to apologize for not making the invitation open to all.
I invited those with whom I have regular email contact. I assumed
they would be interested in showing up to discuss SCN - past,
present, and future.

I'd plan on having the meetings every month, preferably at the
beginning of the month on either a Wednesday or Thursday evening.
Say, like, in the second week of each month?

The meeting was an opportunity to share information about SCN and to
get to know the unfamiliar faces behind the email addresses.

There was no agenda, no minutes. However, here is a synopsis of what
has been going on at SCN:

Seazine is on schedule to be published in December. And pushing for
an edition to be publish monthly.

There is a new webserver. This will allow SCN to run better. And it
is getting better. For details on the new web server, please ask
Steve (steve at groupworks.org) or JJ (jj at scn.org). I am sure they will
appreciate their mailboxes getting slammed.

The old server is being picked apart and deciphered: Undoing the sins
of the past, of volunteers adding things to the servers and following
the assumed policy of not documenting what they did. Everything is
fine, it's just that the servers are being cleaned up so they will
run more efficiently.

A new mail program is being tested. It is called IMP and that is an
acronym for Imap Mail Program. It will have a lot of nice features.

A new logo is in the works by a graphics artist who has an impressive
portfolio. She is located in Boston and she is working on the edits
that have been sent to her.

A new web design is in the works by a local graphics and web guy. He
is also working on the architecture of the site as well and he has
interns helping him.

Rod Clark and I have begun cleaning up SCN webpages. The featured
sites archive page  has been tidied up a bit.

The homepage navigation bar has been cleaned up and reorganized and
it is easier to find what you are looking for. The nav bar will be
going through some changes as we add new things to the menu and
tighten the site architecture.

Featured Sites on the homepage has been a small success. I have been
putting the word out to get recommendations for sites to be featured
on the homepage. I'm amazed that it's tough to get people to accept
free advertising. They must underestimate the exposure their site
would get if they were featured on SCN's homepage.

The process documentation for the topic editors has been sent to the
volunteer coordinator. The documentation outlines the tasks that the
topic editors do to perform their 'job.'

A CGI created by Discusware is in consideration for implementation on
SCN. This will allow viewers to give automatic feedback to SCN in a
bulletin board-like format. 

A message from the president feature will be going up. Also, if I
haven't said so already, a what's new page will be going up to share
what is going on behind the scenes at SCN. Something similar to the
information bulletin. Also, an SCN volunteer page is going up to
recognize the SCN volunteers.

There is now a link to helping.com on the homepage, so you can donate
money quickly and rather painlessly via the web. The link will take
you right to the SCN giving page on that site. Very handy for lazy
people like me who find every opportunity to automate their lives.

I think that is enough for now. There is more going on, but I don't
want anyone nodding off and injuring themselves.

Patrick


=====
Patrick Fisher
Webmaster
http://www.scn.org
Seattle Community Network
"Powering Our Communities with Technology"
Energy and persistence conquer all thing. -- Benjamin Franklin

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