[Cc-webedit] "Be The Media" & Website - Please read

[Jonathan Leighton]

Hi all,

There has been quite a lot of confusion flying around over various email
lists, crabgrass groups and personal messages. This thread an attempt to
sort through the mess once and for all.

First some history. At previous camps, campers have tended to upload
stories to Indymedia UK. There has also been a "documentation" team of
photographers who have been able to upload photos to the main website,
albeit with some hiccups. Then at Kingsnorth, for the first time (I
think), VisionOnTV had its own TV studio and produced a lot of video
content, which was hosted mainly on their own website, but also via an
embed on the climate camp website.

As you will no doubt have heard, the website group is currently
rebuilding the main climate camp website, which we hope will be launched
before the camp. In the process of this we discussed what provisions
there would be for independent media, which lead to a proposal to use
some software called Hyperactive (which runs
http://london.indymedia.org.uk/) to set up a separate "Climate Camp
News" website. This was proposed as a separate website, hosted at
http://news.climatecamp.org.uk/. There would be a feed hosted on the
front page of the climate camp website showing promoted items from the
Climate Camp News site, and the news site would obviously be linked to
as appropriate.

The idea was that this allows anyone to publish basically anything, and
if it's good quality content it will get its slot on the front page. It
also means there is a single repository for climate camp independent
media.

Responding to a request for someone to take on this particular area of
work, JimDog duly set up an installation of Hyperactive. Some time after
that, the media working group met and came up with a list of
requirements for the website:

> just to feed in from the quite important media team meeting on  
> sunday (apologies for late response)
>
> we’d like to see three promo boxes on the front page: text, photo  
> and video.
> each box would show promoted material, or material generated by the  
> documentation & blog teams.
> each box would then link to a separate page for blogs, photos and  
> videos. These would contain
> 1) our own generated material
> 2) a secondary tier of material fed from other trusted sources  
> (i.e. other blogs, stuff picked from tier 3 below)
> 3) a third tier for openly added material"

>From reading this, it sounds like the media team wasn't aware of the
Hyperactive plan during their discussion, but came up with some
requirements which are (mostly) fulfilled by the website plan.

Feel free to check out the home page design:
http://dump.jonathanleighton.com/climate_camp_home.png

That's not exactly how it will look, but I'd draw your attention to
specific things:
 * Blog and press release feeds
 * Twitter feed from our "official" twitter
 * "Climate Campers Online" feed would be promoted items from the
Climate Camp News site
 * "Highlights" section can be used to promote specific things where
necessary - for example Climate Camp TV, camp photography, etc.

Additionally, if we want to have a specific page pulling feed from here
there and everywhere, that would be relatively straightforward to
implement.

I think that this plan is flexible enough to meet the gist of the
requirements everyone is imposing. We really need to all get onto the
same page and decide whether this is okay, as time is running out. I'm
sending this around the email lists, but it would be great if discussion
is kept in one place - so I have set up a Crabgrass discussion here:

https://we.riseup.net/cc_media+btm/be-the-media-website-please-read
+30709

I'd like to suggest a deadline of *Wednesday, 12th August, 9AM* for any
serious dissenting opinions, as we have very little time.

Finally, sorry for any confusion which has resulted from
miscommunication. Please be assured that the website group does want to
help and any problems would ideally not have occurred in a perfect world
with an infinite amount of time and resources... but alas :)

Jonx