Re: [hackers] Fwd: User account details for joshk at Indiana for Dean

[Lynn Siprelle]

This is long, forgive me. I started to respond to this in depth but I 
found myself repeating myself a lot, so I'm going to sum up (believe it 
or not, this is the summary). I don't speak for the group, I can only 
speak from my understanding, but my understanding is this:

On coercing other sites into using our kit: This is A tool, not THE 
tool. Folks are welcome to use whatever tools they've got. We're 
focusing on drupal because we think we can easily set it up both as 
modules for existing drupal sites to drop in and also as a kit folks 
can roll out and have an easy-to-work with set of tools. I am fond of 
saying I am a designer who learned to program in self-defense, and 
granted, I am a quick study but I'm not THAT quick and in the last 
month I've written three themes and a couple of modules, and I have two 
more themes underway. If we do this right, we will have a kit that 
allows you to run an install script from the web and bing you're ready 
to go--if you choose to use the hack4dean/DeanSpace install.

On mailing lists vs bulletin boards: I'm with you on that one. Mailing 
lists scale much better than bulletin boards, except that searching a 
Yahoo group sucks rocks. I'm hep with the gateway vibe myself.

On feeds: Let's say I'm the webmaster of Oregon4Dean. (I have no idea 
if there is one, I haven't looked yet. If there isn't, I think I just 
volunteered myself. EEEEK.) I don't have time to search through every 
weblog in/about Oregon to find the ones for Howard Dean--and I even 
know how. I'd rather depend on my software to allow interested people 
to set up a political blog if they'd like on my site, and then rely on 
the networking/syndication tools to send that info up and down the 
hierarchy.* I myself have two blogs, three if you count the hack4dean 
one I'm running at Kombucha Brewers for Dean. One is my ezine's blog, 
where I try to cover news that's important to my readers, one is at my 
religious website where I cover news related to earth spirituality 
(where I run drupal), and once there's a local or virtual Dean 
community I want to join I'll probably get a political one going too. I 
don't like cluttering up my more site-specific blogs with other issues 
like politics other than occasional mentions. I imagine I'm not the 
only experienced blogger who feels that way, for one, and for seconds, 
if this works the way we think it's going to, we'll be bringing in a 
lot of folks who've never even HEARD the word "blog" before and getting 
them excited about the possibilities (I'm watching this happen right 
now on my religious site and we're not even involved in something as 
exciting as a grassroots campaign). People who want to opt out of this 
aggregation, that's fine, opt out. It's all good, as the kids say these 
days.

On hosting: We've been going around and around about the feasibility of 
setting up a host of our own and I'm staying out of that one. Under FEC 
rules, if I'm understanding this right, my corporation Siprelle & 
Associates Inc. can contribute $2000 worth of hosting services. It 
charges $10/mo under "family and friends" rate for hosting that 
includes PHP, MySQL, email and blah de blah, so that works out to 200 
months of hosting. Let's say we go all the way, and we have every 
reason to believe we're headed for November '04 . That works out to 
about 14 sites for 14 months, if they were established today. So we 
line up 1,000 people and companies like S&A, and you know we're out 
there. I don't think that's such a tall order. I really don't. And this 
is if we make things official or whatever. I am so not following the 
FEC conversations, I am just trying to keep my nose clean and code.

Discuss. :)

Lynn S.

*Having said this, a blog/site registration module to allow bloggers 
and site managers with RSS feeds to register their feeds at DeanSpace 
sites and add them to the Dean aggregation/distribution of info is not 
a bad idea. DON'T LOOK AT ME, I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO PROGRAM SOMETHING 
LIKE THIS. Well, actually, I think I might if it's just registering the 
feed. oh god, what have I done...