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

[Tom Lord]

Thanks Mike!

> My immediate reaction is that we get CiviCRM running on a server
> somewhere, possibly the TTFA one, and use that.  That will give us an
> out of the box system.

Ok, sounds interesting. I've looked at the demo at:

http://drupal6.demo.civicrm.org . I'm not sure whether that's the kind 
of thing I'm looking for or not.

I created an organisation under "professionals". Seemed to ask me for a 
lot of fields, some of which aren't relevant and some of which people 
may not want to share. Maybe that's ok and they'll live with it, maye 
not. Now I can't see the organisation again. Hmm.

Can't see what else to do. Maybe I'm being thick, and would welcome a 
tour of a working CiviCRM system if anyone has one and wouldn't mind 
showing me it, and/or explaining how its features could be used to fit 
the basic requirements I think I have.


   However security and privacy will be an obvious
> concern.

Do you mean people won't want to share private info? I agree. My idea is 
for a system that Joe Public can use. I want to make (safe, public) 
information about groups as transparent as possible, so that I don't 
need to have been in the movement for 4 years to know there's a kitchen 
group in Scotland; to reduce the activist "old boys network" feel... I 
don't think groups should be storing their wicked secrets on here, or 
making it known that there's an AK47 working group in London etc. :-)

So preferably I don't want to even have to log in to see the public face 
of this system - I just want to go to a page that says bang, here you 
go, find groups that are of interest. We made something vaguely like 
this in PHP to list Right-On organisations in Cambridge, at 
www.justliving.org.uk . It has a basic CMS and email forms; it doesn't 
have granular admin; it can't do document uploads, and we never got a 
unified map working. So I don't think it's a goer, but that level of 
ease of access up front wouldn't be bad, I think.

What I want to avoid is something like http://www.iopsociety.org/ , 
which I think is interesting in its ambition and scope - I think it 
started as a good idea in terms of lofty aims and principles to, you 
know, connect the activist world - and then went politically and 
technically awful, imo. It has "features" that force people to do things 
that don't make sense, and un-tended forums that attract mentalists, and 
forces people to join as individuals rather than groups, and then traps 
people inside it in stasis, with no clear guidelines as to how to set up 
groups or make decisions! It was clearly set up without agile-style user 
participation/direction. It inspired me to start thinking about this 
stuff though, which is good :-)


> If that proves too technically difficult to deal with, then may I
> suggest a spreadsheet and laptop on the day to get started.

- agree that a spreadsheet and laptop is the most minimal requirement :-)

Any more thoughts very welcome. If I'm rambling too much on this list 
let me know.

cheers,
Tom.