I have had many long and generally acrimonious conversations with Arthur about LS and its problems. The argument between me and Arthur has been all over the place and the issues have become very murky. The aim of this document is mainly clarification with a view to trying to find a way to move on, rather than continuing in this hyper-emotional state…

At his request I have carefully re-read certain documents from over 2 years ago. These are “Site Technical Plans” and also  two  posts to the Member Test Forum forum several months later.  Print outs of this material are available at tonight’s meeting (but for people not at the meeting there are links to this material attached to the end of this document)

I’ve written this document with these in mind but will probably focus more on “Site Technical Plans”. 

We really have a choice tonight between actually beginning a discussion about “where we are at and how we can deal with it” or continuing to just attack each other.  Of course we will need to refer to past conflicts and discuss conflicting approaches but we can choose to debate these matters with a view to moving on rather than remaining bogged down in personal recriminations.

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My comments on “Site Technical Plans” and  the conflict which was occurring in 2004.

“Site Technical Plans” was written in June 2004. In this document Arthur outlined what he felt needed to be done  under  3 subheadings:  “Immediate”, Transitional” and “Later”.

The “Immediate” subheading covered what would be necessary in order to reopen the site to members and launch a new forum/blog.  He regarded the tasks listed as “feasible very soon”.  These were:

1. Test and provide some minimal end user documentation for the enhanced Blog that will be the main focus for participation and for the site generally.
2. Finalize a folder structure for published documents so that discussions in the Blog can use permanent URLs to link to related documents.
3. Inform people who have joined the announcements email list advertised on the front page that they can request their old user account names and join in the final tests just before we reopen to the general public.

He also suggested that we should refer users to  both the Plone website (www.plone.org) and to the cmfboard website (www.cmfboard.com) so that they could get an idea how the site works. A further recommendation was that anyone interested in helping with technical stuff install a toy plone site on their own PC and said that “no skills are required” to do this.

Finally he pointed out that registered users of LS would be able to create an entire personal website in their own folders.

On the face of it, none of the above seems particularly unreasonable.  However for various reasons it was not actually feasible to achieve it”very soon”.  Arthur feels that the main reason for this was that I was getting in the way and demoralizing him by constantly demanding that we reopen the site immediately and refusing to knuckle down to achieve these things

However in my view we were genuinely bogged down  by difficult-to-solve problems which had  the potential to keep the site closed indefinitely.  It was my view that even  an inadequate website was  better than no site at all. It was never possible to achieve all of Arthur’s plans in a hurry.

Looking directly at “Site Technical Plans” (written about 5 months after the first LS was destroyed) the reality is that we were genuinely stuck with regard to  immediate task number 1 due to having no-one on board who was both  capable and prepared to  modify CMFboard so that it operated more like a blog.  This in turn got in the way of producing end-user documentation. We were capable of getting CMFboard operating in its “out-of-the-box” form and I had done extensive work exploring it in that form. But I had no idea how a blog version would look or how to write documentation for such a non-existent version.

Immediate task number 2  was also difficult. We became extremely bogged down here. Arthur wanted to design a folder structure from the top-down and this required anticipating ahead of time all the content and the categories into which we would organize it. At one point we were even looking at the structure of Encyclopaedia Brittanica for ideas as to how we could do this!   The two Toms became rather lost at this point. TomB basically seemed to feel  that we could get by with almost no folder structure and couldn’t really see the point of it.  I’m not sure of TomG’s position.   My position was that we did need a folder structure and that it would have to eventually become quite sophisticated but that we could open the site with something more simple and develop it as we went along . I felt that we neded to get some real, practical  experience with the “categorizing problem”.  This would necessarily result in some sloppiness and having to undo mistakes as we went along.  However I felt that we needed to just jump in and take a “learning by doing approach”. It seemed too hard and tortuous to try to design something in the abstract. Once again I was driven by the urgency of getting LS up and running.

Immediate task number 3 didn’t seem of vital importance to me.  I did think about it and agreed that it would perhaps be a nice thing to do. But in the scheme of things it just didn’t seem vital. It certainly wasn’t worth slowing things down for.

As far as the other recommendations are concerned my views are as follows:

1. I don’t think that most users would be particularly interested in going to the plone and cmfboard sites in order to understand how the site works. Those sites are for geeks. Certainly it’s a good idea to direct anyone with geek abilities to those sites, but it seemed a minor issue at the time.
2. As far as people building toy plone sites on their own computers is concerned, I disagree that doing such a thing requires “no computer skills”. I know that Anita has tried it and didn’t succeed. I have done it, but fond it difficult and even David JM didn’t find it simple.  I can’t really imagine the Toms, Barry or Patrick messing around with Plone on that level and getting anywhere on their own.
3. It’s certainly true that members of LS are able to create their own personal websites in their user folders. I agree that this would be wonderful and that we should  be working to make it happen.  I also know that so far we have been completely unsuccessful and that we need to work out what we can do to get this level of participation.  I don’t think it is just due to not having properly “invited” people to do this. The problem is far more complex than this.

Under the “Transistional” heading . Arthur wrote:

Then we can proceed to:

1. Generally enhance the usability of the site within essentially the same framework as the old site, except that the “forum” has become more like a Blog, published documents and links, including links to highlighted Blog discussions are stored within folder categories, and more emphasis on active participation through personal and group folders as well as comments in reply to Blog items.
2. Restore material recovered from the Google cache when the old site was stuffed and integrate it within the new site.

The site will then essentially work as follows.

Anyone who has registered as a “member” can contribute documents and links to external sites in their personal folders and refer to them via links in their comments in reply to Blog items.

A small group of “reviewers” can start new topics on the Blog and can select documents and links that have been contributed by members for inclusion as part of the site’s “published” (and therefore easily accessible) navigation structure rather than just within personal folders.

Ad hoc groups can work together on jointly editing material for publication.

I agree with all this and also acknowledge that we have not been able to achieve it so far.  This is what we should be aiming for and should be a focus of current discussions.  I think that fundamentally the  disagreements are not about whether we should aim to achieve these things but about why we haven’t achieved them.  The solution however is to begin a productive discussion as to how they can be achieved.

I also have no disagreements  with Arthur’s suggestions under the heading “Later” which were:

We can develop in various directions, including separately managed sub-sections of the site, using the very powerful facilities available from Plone.

One direction we are likely to move in is much greater integration into the “Blogosphere” and the web generally, with a regular flow of links to interesting items supplied by members as they browse other web sites and a smaller flow of properly categorized published links and documents and Blog items starting topics discussing those links and documents.

At the same time we can also export that material, in categories, both as news feeds to other Bloggers and as email subscriptions etc.

Once again we need to launch a productive discussion about what steps we can take to achieve these things rather than becoming bogged down in recriminations and a sense of outrage at the accusations that have been flung around.

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We all know that Arthur is hopping mad about what he sees as a complete failure on my part to listen carefully to his ideas and implement them.  From previous discussions with him I have got the message that he sees the failure of LS to take off and become a bigger part of the blogosphere to be due to a mixture of bad political attitudes, ignorance of how the blogosphere works and refusal to learn about this by listening carefully to him. He has also said that my way of working has tended to exclude people from participating more fully both in the day to day running of the site and in developing it generally.  I write this in order to make it clear to him that I do know that he feels this way.

At the risk of becoming boring I repeat however that rather than continuing with recriminations (and defences against recriminations) what we need to do now  is to lay the problems out on the table and work together to improve both the site and the political situation.  My view is that we have achieved a number of positive things and that these deserve to be celebrated.  At the same time we are failing in a number of very important ways and these need to be faced up to. 

Outlining the problems

Because I’m writing this in a hurry and the topic is rather enormous, I’ll just jump in and start describing the problems in no particular order.

General Confusingness

The site is hard to “get around’ in.  A naive person arriving at the Welcome Page won’t find it all that easy to quickly discover what we are on about.  The Welcome Page itself is cluttered and somewhat off-putting to look at. It needs to be redesigned and should also be updated very regularly and act as a genuine gateway to the rest of the site.

Folder Structure etc

 I don’t think many casual visitors would click on the yellow folders on the left-hand side of the Welcome Page (and most other pages) in order to read the material we have in those folders.   And that material has not been updated regularly and is fairly disorganized in any case. I take the main responsibility for that.

We now  need to re-work our folder structure.  At the moment the practical side of this is probably a job for David and me.  However it would be a good idea to involve others in deciding how we want it to be organized  in the end.  Currently all our material is “physically”  stored in archives but we can display any given item in as many folders as we want.  DavidJM and I are the only ones who know how to create dynamic pages in order to do this.  Pruning our keywords (which are used to make particular items appear in various folders) is a job that requires only conceptual understanding of our categories so this task could involve anyone who is also prepared to take part in broader discussions about folder structure.

Currently we have 5 top level folders  for displaying content n different categories. These are:

World

Sci/Tech

Politics

Philosophy

History

All of these contain subfolders.  (I was going to write a bit more about this but I’m running out of time. We could possibly actually take a look at the folders tonight in order to give people an idea of how the current system operates. )

The main Forum

There is a great deal of interesting material in the Main Forum but this is mixed in with a lot of stuff that is not so good.  Due to the ephemeral nature of forums, important stuff has become buried and will not currently be discovered by people unless they are very interested.  The original plan was to make sure that all important forum posts were linked to the relevant yellow folders, so that people who looked through them would come across them that way.  I have not kept up with this task, due to being somewhat demoralized over the past 9 months.  But as part of fixing the folder structure we should also catch up with this task.

We also need to write some sort of guide to the forum. DavidJM and I started work on this some time ago but ran out of steam/motivation.  What we had in mind was some sort of annotated guide which would lead people quickly to our most important material. The “Forum Archive” currently posted as an “announcement” at the top of the forum was a first step in this process.

Developing LS as a resource

I have also not kept up with the task of collecting interesting material from around the web and making it available in the appropriate folder and in the News side-bar. One reason for this is that much of the most interesting and relevant material around the web is written from an overtly right-wing/neo-con perspective and I’ve wanted to avoid the perception that we are just another neo-con site. I have wanted to display this material but have felt that we need to accompany it with some sort of introduction explaining why we as left wingers would be posting it on our site.  On  the first LastSuperpower I would have just posted it without such an introduction, but at the current stage I have not wanted us to be top-heavy with overtly neo-con material. 

The problem of being tiny and isolated

We are very short of people to do the  work (eg posting neo-con material with our own intro/analysis…and all the other stuff). I don’t believe that this shortage of cadres is due to “huddling” and excluding others. Suffice it to say that we are objectively very isolated and  very small and that I believe that this is due to the overall political situation and will not magically disappear when we improve the site on a technical level.

In saying this I am not arguing that the technical problems do not require urgent resolution.  I am just trying to break down the problems into different components so that we can make an accurate assessment of where we are at and how we can deal with it.

Visions of how things could be

I think that I do understand Arthur’s vision of how a successful site would look and function. And I also happen to agree with his vision. Our differences have tended to arise over how to achieve this given our current limitations.  My basic attitude has been that

an unsastisfactory  site is immeasurably better than no site at all. We are now talking about a concrete site which is full of flaws and people are beginning to understand problems which were only abstractions to them before the site was opened.

Plone is very powerful software.  If we were (a) using it properly  and (b) were able to attract more participants and (c) able to teach them how the site works (this is complex and has both technical and political aspects), we would have a situation in which people joined the site and began to submit their own material.  This means that they would know how to use their own member folders to write and submit material for consideration by a team of trusted “reviewers”. At login, a reviewer would see that material had been submitted for possible publication and would then take the time to read it carefully and then make a decision about what to do with it.  Such material could then be displayed very prominently (say on the Welcome page) or less prominently in one (or more) of the yellow folders in the navigation structure. It could also be  rejected outright or alternatively,  the author could be given suggestions for improving it in some way.

It would also be possible for individual members to create their own personal mini website (within the confines of their member folder).  They could then link to their own material both on the forum and from other sites.  (Of course we might have to draw the line somewhere if we were being taken over by people pushing reactionary ideas…)

If we were functioning properly we would also have established better RSS feeds. Currently we haven’t been able to do this. That’s a big bone of contention between me and Arthur.  When our new ISP (sixfeetup.com) migrates the site to Plone 2.1 I think we will be able to solve this RSS problem.  I am currently negotiating with the people at sixfeetup about this (with Paul’s help).

The migration to Plone 2.1 is likely to enable us to solve a few other problems such as the broken email subscription to forums. It will also enable us to test out some new forum software (ploneboard) and to make a decision about whether to use that instead of our current forum software (CMFboard). If we decide to stay with CMFboard we will be using a more recent release of that software which I believe works somewhat better than what we are using now.

Sixfeetup will soon establish a test site where we will be able to view (a snapshot) of LS running on Plone 2.1 and at that point we will know a bit more about how the site will perform and what problems the move will/will not solve.   When we are happy with the way it runs on Plone2.1 we will replace the current site with the most recent version of it running on Plone2.1.

None of this will automatically solve the problem of a lack of cadres and general participation. Although the technical inadequacies of the site have probably contributed to this lack of participation, I don’t think we are isolated primarily because of faults with the site and how it is run.

Nevertheless we certainly need a focus on solving site problems so that we can maximize our chances of broadening out.

We need a functioning Steering Committee and more people who know how the site works and can take on the tasks involved in keeping it up to date.   I thnk that this will be hard to achieve because of limitations in person-power and understanding of how the site works.  However I also think that we can get some sort of a steering committee up and running and make it better over time. 

It’s true that I’ve run things in an ad hoc way and I agree with Arthur that we now need something more formal.  However we shouldn’t embrace the sort of formality which becomes cumbersome and results in bogging us down. This is another issue that we need to discuss.

Huddling  etc

We are mainly a group of older generation adults, often only minimally computer literate. I think Arthur believes that the lack of wider participation from other (possibly more technically capable) people is due to fundamentally faulty politics characterized by us “huddling together”, “talking to ourselves”, “complacency”, “smugness” etc etc.

I don’t agree with as the fundamental explanation.  It’s true that we are a small group and also very isolated . This certainly makes us prone to all those things and I am very aware that this affects our work and that we have sometimes come over in that way and is manifested in how we debate, both on our own site, on others and off the web.   

But the lack of general “web skills” in our inner group is a core problem. It is just a fact that hardly anyone among the inner group of LS people other than me, David and Arthur has a good sense of the blogosphere and the way in which it is all linked together, the potential of RSS feeds, trackbacks, permalinks and so on. It’s also true that most members of the group don’t have much time to learn all this stuff.  There may also be an element of “not being bothered” and not seeing the importance of it as well, however I don’t think that this is the primary thing.

If we were a group pushing more popular ideas we would have been able to overcome our lack or expertise by just recruiting a bunch of more technically minded, younger people. But we haven’t had that luxury.  We have been stuck with…ourselves.  I’m not saying that there aren’t people out there, but IMO they must be very thin on the ground. I believe that anyone who had ideas similar to ours and really wanted to find us would be able to. 

Arthur has said to me from time to time that he thinks that people with “our sort of views” might have visited LS and then immediately gone away because the site is so awful and we look like such “huddlers”.  I really doubt this.  And upon further questioning he (Arthur) has agreed that if he had come across “another LS” somewhere on the net he would not have rejected it out of hand. He would have at least watched it with interest (and IMV would not have been able to resist joining in!!)

I think that the sad truth is that we  are largely alone and that we don’t have a ready pool of younger, more technically proficient people who agree with us to recruit from.

Last Superpower is actually an enormous project. In one sense the aim has been to make it a “website about everything”.  But I suppose the foolish old man did get the mountain removed in the end….

Relevant urls:

Site Technical Plans (which is the only document I addressed directly. The other material is general background)

http://www.lastsuperpower.net/about1/siteinfo/techsite/tech-overview/

Response to Minutes  and Response to keza:

These can be found in the old steering committee forum (which  we were using  before the site was opened in 2004 )

The address of that forum (relevant posts are the 4^th and 5^th on the page):

http://www.lastsuperpower.net/about1/siteinfo/plan/internal/members/