[blag-whereto] Small Feats

[Abdur-Rahman Morgan]

Ping Subscribers!

Two weekends ago, I re-created the blag-users and blag-devel mailing
list on lists.blagblagblag.org. I will be subscribing those on this list
to both mailing list soon, so there will be no need to sign up again. If
you prefer not to be on either list please send an e-mail and I will be
sure to remove your e-mail from being subscribed.

I will also be sending invites to all the members on the forum to join
as well. There are 886 subscribers. For those above who have e-mailed me
not to be included, I will be sure to remove the same e-mail address
from the list of those that are on the forum. For everyone else, you
might receive a duplicate.

Today, I completed the build on icecat and will be working within the
next week to building about a dozen other packages[1].

March-April were planning months and by months end I hope that we can
complete setting up infrastructure to progress with development needed
for May-June. I have been doing development locally and am eager to have
this process take place within an open environment to reduce issues of
access.

In May, you can expect the Alpha. I am eager to get feedback to work on
the design to blagify system much differently than we have done in the
past, but also need your knowledge to overcome some challenges that I
hope to integrate into the wiki and site.

So there are a few things I want to share with you.
The Alpha is ready. Setting up git to ensure that we have a good
framework to contribute changes is needed

For May -June, package creation, testing and improvements are a major
goal in addition to repo development.

I've begun the process of developing a new site based on Plone for
easier web development. They layout mirrors the content of the current
site and design. For anyone with experience with Plone, I'd like your help.

We now have a dump of the wiki and my hope is to have that we can put
that on the main domain in order to provide a good reference for
contributors to build on.

The present wiki was documented well by cyrille and Koko for some of the
development task I mentioned above. I'd like to see the structure of the
wiki improved to have it look less like like wikipedia and similar to
wiki.gnome.org. I'd like to develop the wiki to engage visitors and I
would also like to integrate a mechanism for users using the OS to be
able to interact with the content of the wiki.

In regards to the design of the OS, wiki, site, I'd like to see design
that incorporates features of 19th and 20th century anarchist
literature, specifically typography and in respect to design, I'd like
to see a something that models the graphic design between that era.

Since I have not had any feedback from the forums about the release
name, upon researching political prisoners of the jerichomovement[2], I
plan the release to be named jericho.

My goal is simply not to release BLAG as another endorsed Free/GNU Linux
distribution. It is to become more of a community of individuals that
are discussing the personal, social, political and economic of impact
free software within the discourse of the struggles within each of our
nations for all people who are maintaining,fighting,dying and striving
for human equality and justice on those same platforms.

Thus, as eager as I am to have a new release, I am planning to release
based on the principal that people are to be empowered to use BLAG
because it aligns with the values they are committed to as they strive
to support the projects and causes they believe in. Thus, if people have
Libre Office writer to write a political prisoner to support them in
incarceration, then they should equally be empowered to advocate and
write those who have put them their unjustly to ensure that a voice does
not become silence. If any organization can use any of the planning
software to schedule meetings and be better at coordinating with members
and activities, then I hope they choose BLAG because they see a
community of people using software in such a way that empowers them to
do so as well.

So are we there yet. No. It is my goal to get there and the feedback
from the Alpha, on the site, wiki and is so fundamentally important to
making sure that we are eating the food we make.
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[1]https://blag.fsf.org/ticket/39
[2]http://www.thejerichomovement.com/jericho.html