Changes between Version 2 and Version 3 of ussf_book_chapter

Timestamp:

Sep 19, 2008, 4:15:21 AM (17 years ago)

Author:

Josue Guillen

Comment:

--

ussf_book_chapter

@@ -4 +4 @@
         --Josue Guillen (The Praxis Project) Co-Chair, Communications Working Group
 
-An event as remarkable, unprecedented and complex as the US Social Forum was sure to present enormous opportunities and daunting challenges for all its organizers and participants.
+An event as remarkable, unprecedented and complex as the US Social Forum (USSF) was sure to present enormous opportunities and daunting challenges for all its organizers and participants.
 
-We at May First/People Link knew that from the start. And as technology organizers, we knew that the USSF would inherit both the already complex and nuanced relationship our movements in this country have with technology and the dependence on technology that the Social Forum movement has had world-wide.
+We at May First/People Link (MF/PL) knew that from the start. And as technology organizers, we knew that the USSF would inherit both the already complex and nuanced relationship our movements in this country have with technology and the dependence on technology that the Social Forum movement has had world-wide.
 
 As Director of the Brecht Forum Liz Mestres (who's been to other Social Forums, including the first in Brazil) put it: "The Social Forums could not have happened without the Internet and the technology. It would have been impossible."
@@ -20 +20 @@
 And it has changed our lives and it is impossible for us to return to the way things were before it.
 
-We are, all of us, part of a huge movement thrusting forward into this "other world" the Social Forum talks about and trying, clumsily, chaotically and inconsitently, to do it together as a world. The Internet is, among so much else, clear proof that "another world is possible."
+We are, all of us, part of a huge movement thrusting forward into this "other world" the Social Forum talks about and trying, clumsily, chaotically and inconsistently, to do it together as a world. The Internet is, among so much else, clear proof that "another world is possible."
 
 So it's easy to understand the immediate relationship between the USSF and technology: from the very start, USSF organizing relied on the now accepted protocols like email and mail lists and websites. The reliance on those tools to reach out, announce intentions and begin planning was automatic; at this point in our history, our use of these things isn't a choice, it's an automatic response.
 
-But the challenge for technology organizers at the USSF went much farther than those activities. The real issue was how our movements would incorporate the use of technology to not only realize this event but to enhance it and embue it with the fundamentally democratic culture that on-line technology represents.
+But the challenge for technology organizers at the USSF went much farther than those activities. The real issue was how our movements would incorporate the use of technology to not only realize this event but to enhance it and imbue it with the fundamentally democratic culture that on-line technology represents.
 
-Less than a year before the forum, May First/People Link attended one of the early northeast regional US social forum meetings in Massachusetts. Inspired but what we experienced, we reached out to our network of progressive techies, inviting them to the first NYC meeting about the US social forum in October and after the meeting we discussed ways to support the organizing effort.
+Less than a year before the forum, MF/PL attended one of the early northeast regional US social forum meetings in Massachusetts. Inspired but what we experienced, we reached out to our network of progressive techies, inviting them to the first NYC meeting about the US social forum in October and after the meeting we discussed ways to support the organizing effort.
 
 Several weeks later, when Josue Guillen became Communications Committee Chair, we learned that very little had been done to prepare the technology for this Social Forum. The website was under-developed. One person was in charge of all of it and little thought had been given to how to integrate basic functions like registration and program scheduling into the website.
@@ -46 +46 @@
 The normal reaction of a provider or shop would have been to take on the entire task -- like a project or job. But that approach would have cheated us of the opportunity the USSF provided us: to unify those technologists into a coordinated team that would not only serve the technology needs of the Social Forum but would influence and help guide its planning and use of the technology so that the event would be as open and participatory as possible.
 
-At the same time, that kind of "team approach" would enrich techies politics and provide a different Internet experience which contradicted the normal isolation and bring them into the movement as organizers.
+At the same time, that kind of "team approach" would enrich techies' politics and provide a different Internet experience which contradicted the normal isolation and bring them into the movement as organizers.
 
 At that point, this was no longer an MF/PL effort; it belonged to a committed and involved network of progressive technologists.
 
-Responding to a call we made over the Internet, a group of techies began meeting and planning. Eventually over 30 technologists nationwide began used a series of on-line meetings and mail lists to plan an approach and work with all the teams involved in organizing the forum to discuss that approach and the Forum's needs.
+Responding to a call we made over the Internet, a group of techies began meeting and planning. Eventually over 30 technologists nationwide began using a series of on-line meetings and mail lists to plan an approach and work with all the teams involved in organizing the forum to discuss that approach and the Forum's needs.
 
-This group, called the ICT work group, met for six months every Sunday on-line using chat software. 
+This group, called the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) work group, met for six months every Sunday on-line using chat software. 
 
 Throughout the planning and development work, the group stressed the importance of using Free and Open Source Software as both a political statement and the most effective way of keeping these processes open and unencumbered. That was among its first decisions.
@@ -58 +58 @@
 The group's first practical task was, of course, the USSF website. After some discussion, the ICT group decided to use Drupal, one of the Internet's most popular and powerful content management systems, as the website's foundation.
 
-But even at that early stage, we all realized that Drupal's default "out of the box" wouldn't come close to meeting this event's needs. It was clear that the site would have to take on the awesome task of registering everyone coming to the Forum as well as most of the logistical communications and data storage, not to mention the promotion and mobilization to the event itself.
+But even at that early stage, we all realized that Drupal's default "out of the box" configuration wouldn't come close to meeting this event's needs. It was clear that the site would have to take on the awesome task of registering everyone coming to the Forum as well as most of the logistical communications and data storage, not to mention the promotion and mobilization to the event itself.
 
 Working individually and in mini-teams, the ICT team worked to make all that happen with the development of dozens of specially-designed "scripts" (or mini-programs) for the site and as many customized displays.