The nascent Geneva Web Collective met again today, with Gerald, Marcus and Xavier in addition to last weeks attendees. The following points were moreorless agreed:
EasyGiga was the right host
we should get the domain names genevawebcollective .org, .com, .ch
That the units of internal currency would be called hours and would be cashable at 20 CHF
There would be two levels of membership, associate and member, where associates would pay more to join than members.
The next meeting will be in two weeks, and will be a public Drupal meetup on the subject of using eclipse. We shall meet for...
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Adventures in mutual credit
The LETS world seems to attract idealists who start projects which are bigger than their ability to pursue them. Focusing on software, I only know of one project with more than one person working on it - Cyclos. There seem to be several one man initiatives which aren't going anywhere. And it's not like everyone is trying to achieve the same thing either, which explains in part why these people aren't working together. Here is a list of people and projects I have direct experience of:
Cyclos is a very powerful open source java application enabling communities to trade. Its funders however,...
Last night I met Samuel and Florian at Tim's house to discuss what the Geneva Web collective should be. Apologies from Marc, Stephie and Gerald. This is as far as we got:
The Geneva Web Collective will be an association of web professionals working under a single umbrella to support non-profit organisations and to implement their online strategies.
We aim to be the first point of enquiry when non-profit and UN organisations in Geneva consider a new web project.
Members of the collective could use the name and reputation of the collective to bid on their own projects. They could then...
Geneva is probably the non-profit capital of the world and therefore a natural target for Drupal. Development Seed, who specialise in non-profits, called this meeting as they were passing through soliciting clients. Development Seed have invested a lot in growing the community in Washington DC and there are now three groups in that city.
This meeting was attended by a mixture of developers, organisations using Drupal, and organisations considering Drupal, 16 people in all.
I opened the meeting with a few words about growing the community and the intention to start a 'Geneva Web...
Perhaps you have heard of LETS, timebanks, or other community projects in which arbitrary currencies are created? Well, there is now a suite of modules to support communities trading in local money?
Currently the suite consists of three modules, a directory of members' offers and wants, an optional autocategorisation module, to help with consistent use of categories, and a transaction module. Later it will be possible to define multiple currencies, do taxation, and much more?
I haven't promoted this project widely within the drupal community because my target users are the hundreds of...
Some organisations I meet have a clear idea of the web sites they want, or think they do. They will write an RFP (Request For Proposal) which broadly outlines all the features of their desired web site and I think they expect that someone will walk in and build it as described. Using a modular system like Drupal it's very easy to allocate each feature to a module, and implement several features per day until the job is done. And yes, I could just walk in and build it, and many web shops, particularly small ones, will do just that.
This is fine if you're a local business, but the danger...
I have just released my first drupal module, http_headers. This allows the administrator, for each contentType, to control cache settings in the browser and proxy servers. This means that in developing countries, better use of bandwidth can be made. To download and try the module, go to
https://drupal.org/project/httpHeaders
I live and work in Geneva, the NGO capital of the world. Just in order to pay their overheads, organisations here need solid core funding. Switzerland must also have one of the highest costs of employing staff in the world. This usually means that when an NGO wants a funky web site, they can often afford to pay a commercial developer up to $1000 per person-day to build it.
(My mission in Geneva, by the way, is to lower that cost.)
There is also sufficient networking spirit in this Geneva that the technical people, web managers, or knowledge managers in these organisations have access...
Background
Users in developing countries are often extremely short of bandwidth. They don't want their browsers requesting pages that should already be cached. The HTTP protocol has excellent support for pages to declare expiry and last-modified dates, and for the server and client to decide whether to send a file accross the network or use one already cached.
HTTP headers are even more invisible though, than the HTML head, are are not even seen by web designers. Consequently with the advent of higher and higher level web site management tools, and improved networks, configuring these...
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