Openecology

=Overview= Archive of Website development.

Welcome
OpenEcology.org Alpha: http://transformativecommunities.com/openecology/

Sign Up: http://transformativecommunities.com/openecology/index.php?option=com_community&view=frontpage&Itemid=73

Bugs: http://transformativecommunities.com/openecology/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=2&id=4&Itemid=58

Start
Join the Community: build your profile, add your favorite videos relevant to the œ community, friend the people you know and join groups. Each œtool has a group where we discuss and provide support for specific tools.

Join a Project: Once registered, hover over the home tab and click Projects. This will take you to our project management system where you'll be able to join an existing project or create your own.

Post an Article: Once registered, hover over the home tab and click Articles. This will take you to a 'submit' page where you can add articles, organized under sections and categories. Read about our sec/cat org system here.

Tweet with and join our facebook group.

Contributing Articles
All articles in Joomla are required to have a section and a category for organizational purposes. We use these to display different types of content. Categories exist within sections so select your section first, then your category.

The sections/categories are as follows:

News items show up on the home page and on œ tool pages.

-General is community news

-CEB Press is for updates on the development of the CEB Press

-Power Cube is for updates on the development of the Power Cube

Tools shows up in the tabbed boxes on tool pages.

-CEB Press Description are the items in the CEB Press tabbed box

-Power Cube Description are the items in the CEB Press tabbed box

About shows up in the 'Mission' tab. This is static, fixed content, not a place to 'blog.'

-Vision is open ecology philosophy.

-œStandards are benchmarks such as œCriteria, œLabel, œLicense

-Organization is basic info about the project.

œBlog is - for now - mostly technical updates. When a team emerges to harvest awesome content from the 'places' blogs and to create content itself, we'll expand this out into a 'magazine'. We should talk more about this on the forums.

-Outreach is communications people are creating to explain OE to others.

-Opportunities are solicitations for volunteers.

We'd like to keep people out of the back end where sections and categories are created, especially while we're in Alpha, so let's discuss other sections/categories and arrangements in the forum. http://transformativecommunities.com/openecology/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=2&id=12&Itemid=58

The New FactorEFarm.org
We should rebrand the existing openfarmtech blog factorefarm and move it to factorefarm.org. This allows us to position factorefarm as a model for coworking/hacker/maker space participation in the openecology network.

In the interest of making factorefarm a model, I propose changing the blog's theme to the 'Twenty Ten' Default Wordpress theme, upload a factorefarm 'brand banner' into the top of the site and loosely following the architectural convention here: http://transformativecommunities.com/openecology/?option=com_wordpress&Itemid=5

The Open Ecology Network
This is a network of independent blogs from people and places that contribute to the open ecology movement. The first of these blogs would be the current Open Source Ecology blog at openfarmtech.org. The idea behind encouraging participants to blog independently on their own Wordpress is to make it as easy as possible for anyone using/modifying/discussing œtools to create primary source materials. This source material is gold because we'll be able to help people integrate this material into œ resources and their own projects.

Usage Examples
This is a breakdown of the last three blog posts to explain what content should go on the existing blog and what should go on OE.

Economy in a Box

If the 'we got invited' refers to the 'we' of Factor E Farm then this should be posted on the Factor E Farm Blog with a blurb in News>General of OE. If the 'we' refers to the broader OSE/OE community then the entire post should be in the in the News.General site with a blurb on the Factor E Farm site.

Facebook/Twitter update/link to post with appropriate @ replies and #openecology

Modular CEB Construction

On the Factor E Farm Blog Scott should write his own introduction - not be introduced by you - so he get's the article attribution in the wordpress database. This makes things cleaner - more networkable.

OE Social Network Profile He should also fill out a profile on the social network and link to it in the blog post. (I'll make the profile fields consistent with the application but there's a bug in the jomsocial we need to fix first.) He should also post videos/photos and join the product groups in which he's working.

Facebook/Twitter update/link to post with appropriate @ replies and #openecology

Open Source Power Cube

On the Factor E Farm Blog This should be a blog post announcing factor e farm's release of power cube with links to the cube's product page on openecology.org and development page on the ose wiki. The video is perfect here and should be reposted on the power cube's community group on OE.

On OE A PR style announcement of the release News>Power Cube.

Product Page Marcin, add the following articles under Tools>Power Cube Product - description, features (basic statistics), specifications (you can add your image), ingredients (bill of materials), comparisons.

OE Social Network Community Group Everyone who participated in the construction of the powercube should join the group, upload all their own personal video and photos and conduct discussions here. We'll take the best pics and add them to the product page. People who will take responsibility for the continued development (and support) of the power cube should apply to be admins. You should also repost the release in the announcements area.

Facebook/Twitter update/link to post with #openecology and #powercube

OpenEcology.org Architecture
'''This is currently out of date. Will update before November.'''

Wireframes

OpenEcology v.1.1:

Home is a place for graphical explanations, news, social media, etc. Once you've signed in, you'll also find the Community Management tab come down, which is a light weight project management system (Project Fork) we're considering using to manage the team that maintains/develops the site and online community.

About is static content explaining the effort. I've iFrames (wrapper) relevant info from the wiki into this section. This is only temporary as we'll add this content as pages with graphics and designs over the next few days.

oe Tools (name changed from products/projects) is the main area for accessing information about the tools being created. This is going to be our biggest challenge as we'll need to produce a custom page template.

Community has the following features:
 * A social network (jomsocial) that we should start using as our primary communication platform.
 * A forum that integrated with the social network and the broader content management system
 * The Wiki. Right now it's only a wrapper of the current one but we'll be integrating it into the broader system in the next few days.
 * A directory to list the people, places and things in the open source universe.
 * Bottom tool bar with chat so you can IM with anyone on the site.

We can use what we like, remove what we don't and change things around. These features are a starting point.

Blogs are narratives from people using oe tools. We recently found a way to place multiple wordpress blogs into the joomla site, which means people have independent wordpress blogs (no reason for everyone who wants to contribute to learn Joomla) within the site that are integrated to the site's other features as well as the other blogs. I think we should encourage key people/places developing and deploying oe tools with us to have their own blogs. We should import the current openfarmtech.org/weblog into the site, rename it factorefarm and have it be our first place/land blog. My friend with land in Pennsylanvia could be a second. As more and more people/places start participating, we can recruit them into our blog network, which will become an exceptional collection of narratives, an awesome media property and source material for people who want to take the insights from the blogs and add them to the wiki, products etc.

Resources is where we can place the most essential and useful pieces of media - videos (powered by jomsocial), books, documents and links. We might want to place the directory here...we'll see how it develops.

Join Us has articles labelled 'opportunities' on the left side. This is where we can post volunteer/job descriptions and the like. On the right side are our social media modules: Calendar, Twitter, Facebook, BEEx. We could also use Identi.ca, which is an open source twitter... what do you think?

Store is a pretty simple application with a shopping cart and many payment options. The product information section isn't very deep. When people want to buy tools section, we plan to link them to the store's page and vice versa.

In general, let's try and keep discussions away from email and on the forums and social network.

Excited to see you on the site!

=See Also=
 * Website