About
This is a blog written by Ed Mitchell, Transition Network web co-ordinator. It is here to keep people up to date with the Transition Network web project, and provide those who are interested with a chance to make contact etc.
To get in touch with Ed, please use the contact form on the contact page.
An overview of what the web project seeks to do:
The web project is a bit like seeing the canopy layer of a rainforest – a forest dweller wanting to find more information and people related to a theme they are interested in (but have no immediate knowledge of) could pop their heads above the canopy to find others interested in the same things from around the rainforest, identify them, then drop back into the forest to converse and meet in a local way.
The Transition Network site will provide a wide (global) perspective on Transition activities. Our ‘core data’ is about initiatives, projects, people and events. These will be categorised by the Transition Themes and location, enabling any user to find information relating to a theme and/or their location.
Thus someone who wants to know more about ‘Energy’ can go to the energy page and see initiatives, projects, events and people from around the movement who have expressed an interest in, or doing projects in that topic. Said person could then look at these initiatives or projects and then get directly in contact with them.
The technical structure of the web project:
The web project is the over-arching term to cover all of the different services that we will be using on the web to support Transition Network (the charity set up to support the movement) and the Transition Towns Movement (the body of people that make up the initiatives, events, projects, connections and thinking).
The services the project is supporting can roughly be described like this:
- Transition Network website: the organisational ‘presence’; who we are and what we do, contact, newsletter subscription etc.
- Community services: ‘groupware’ for initiatives, projects and networks, forums for wider discussions
- The directories: initiatives, projects, events, users, news (underpinning 1 and 2)
- The heavy tech stuff: domain name management: URLs, DNS lookup tables, subdomains, relationships between groupware and drupal configs etc.
- The Sharing Engine: aggregating all the news from the movement, indexing it, making it searchable and re-syndicating it out to the movement again
(The Transition Towns movement stuff is very important indeed, and a bit of 2, 3, 4, 5)
Web project areas diagram
The human structure of the web project:
The web project is a balance of different inputs from different people with different experiences and offers. It answers to the Transition Network board ultimately, but we try to distribute decision-making authority to those who know the most about the decision.
It looks a bit like this:
Core team:
Ben Brangwyn
(Jon and) Gary Alexander
People:
- Ben Brangwyn (Transition Network co-founder)
- Gary Alexander (Voluntary expert, Transition East)
- Ed Mitchell (Transition Network web co-ordinator)
Purpose of group:
- momentum
- balance
- guidance
- approval
- conflict resolution
- long term view
- external view
Transition Technologist group:
Transition Technologist group (most of)
People (and some sort of areas of interest):
- Chris Croome (Sheffield, sys admin expert)
- Daniel Harris (Dartmoor, semantic web expert)
- Jim Kirkpatrick (Winchester, developer)
- John McGeechan (Totnes, developer)
- Graham Mitchell (Marsden and Slaithwaite, co-op expert and developer)
- Laura Whitehead (Newton Abbot, design)
Purpose of group:
- Provide reasonable, reliable, knowledge-able technical support to the Network and the Movement as a whole
- Share design and development work for project in a democratic and open manner
- Deliver website and related services within budget
- Maintain website and related services within budget
- Establish working practices and processes before group opens in 2010
The Technologist group is currently ‘closed’ so that we can work together as a core initialising team to establish the processes and checks and balances and money and quality and stuff. It will be opened up to a wider group of people mid 2010.
The board:
They who I formally report to. The bridge between the funders and the project. The representatives of the different parts of Transition Network.
Transition Network board
The funders:
Naturally we are big gratitude to our funders who make this all possibly financially. The Tudor Trust is an independent grant-making trust which supports UK-based organisations addressing social, emotional and financial needs of people at the margins of society, and particularly smaller under-resourced organisations which offer direct services and which involve the people they work with in their planning.
