[HacktionLab] proposed system for Movement Support Gathering - any interest?

[Tom Lord]

Hiyup,

I'm going to the Movement Support Gathering that Mick mentioned, in a 
few weekends. (hereafter MSG, for brevity and amusement)

I'm excited about the opportunity for The Movement (whatever it is!) to 
start being more savvy about being connected, accessible, aware of 
itself, more able to share resources and ideas, and more strategic.

I'm interested in creating a very simple online directory coming out of 
that meeting, to make it more likely that people and groups will be able 
to find each other in the future and collaborate on radical fun, and to 
see if people find that useful. If that proves to be useful, I'd be up 
for taking it on as a long term project to gather requirements from 
groups / users about how it could work technically and politically, and 
what further features might be useful. In the longer term, in my wild 
dreams, I'm interested to see if groups would be up for more connecting 
of "movement" groups in general, not just "movement support" groups.

I'm wondering:

a) if anyone here is up for helping me think through what a sensible 
initial technical platform would be - I'll send a separate email about 
what I reckon would be good initial features / requirements.


b) if there are any people (other than me :-) who would be up for at 
least one of:

- helping me to build something before the MSG that we can start to use 
to capture details on the day

- come along to the MSG to help gather requirements and to talk about 
possibilities with groups represented there

- work on it with me afterwards.


I have some technical background, and have rarely flexed my tech muscles 
recently; I admit I end up managing far more than developing! I'm not a 
good sysadmin. I'm looking for support locally, and even Cambridge seems 
to have only so many potentially-radical geeks.

Let me know any comments, questions - I'd really be up for chatting this 
through with anyone who's interested in any form, and can set aside most 
of my non-work time between now and the MSG to work on it.

cheers,
Tom.