Loomio
Sat 17 Dec 2016 1:57PM

Exciting news: dev.coops.tech is ready for your input!

The amazing work that Outlandish and Glowbox Designs have been doing developing a promotional web site for Co-operative Technologists, complete with a fantastic video from Blake House, is now at a stage where it is ready to have co-ops edit / upload their details, add clients and technologies and generally give it a spin :-)

It is currently set not to be indexed by search engines -- when we are happy that it has enough good quality content to be made live it'll be moved to from dev.coops.tech to www.coops.tech.

Editor accounts have been created using the contact list addresses, if you need access to the site see the process for getting an account and there is the start of some user help documentation, but the site is powered by WordPress and it easy to use so help documentation might not even be needed.

Please Note: It is going to take each co-op some time to get all their data into the site, it is a bigger job than putting your co-op details and categories on the wiki and there are a lot of gaps there...

I'm very excited by the site have have been busy helping sorting out the hosting and deployment process for it over the last few days, in Slack, so haven't had hardly any time to post to the recent discussion threads on Loomio but I have read all the posts via email and might post some thoughts when I have some spare time (just to make the point again that getting stuff done is often more interesting than chatting about getting stuff done... ;-) ).

At the moment the site is hosted on a very low spec development machine, if it is too slow let me know and more RAM can be added to it, the current plan is to host it on one of the Webarchitects WordPress shared hosting servers but if it proves too big or popular for this it can be moved to it's own virtual server (that would be nice!).

Alex is hopefully going to make the code available as a GitLab project soon so at that point we will have a bug tracker / ticketing system to go with it and it'll also be possible to open up to allow wider contributions to the code, in the mean time there is a small wishlist on the wiki.

There has been some discussion of the draft manifesto in the #onlineplatform Slack group and we have created a manifesto wiki page where edits can be made and alternatives can be suggested. People might also want to do the same for the about us page.

HR

Harry "Outlandish" Robbins Mon 19 Dec 2016 7:46AM

Thanks @chriscroome and everyone who got the site to this point. I think it's looking amazing - a great sales and recruitment tool already.

I've added Outlandish's clients and a few more services including Big Data and Hosting. I've also added logos for the various clients people had added - can people make sure they add logos themselves in the future please or it makes the site look broken.

There's obviously more work to do to fix bugs and improve the way it works, but I'd say it's very nearly launchable.

We need everyone to go in and connect themselves to the relevant services, technologies and clients. Please also update your data including your turnover and number of employees. If that is wrong or missing it will make us look less successful than we really are.

There will need to be some discussion about what services should be included, etc. and what features we should add. There has been some discussion around a 'sector' section of the site (e.g. Education, Arts, Not-for-profit) etc. which I think could be really powerful.

We also need some sort of process that will enable us to deal with enquiries - @chriscroome is there some sort of ticketing system that might work?

RB

Roy Brooks Mon 19 Dec 2016 9:31AM

Ditto on the 'sector' notion. Great idea.

CCC

Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative) Mon 19 Dec 2016 9:54PM

@harryrobbins said:

We also need some sort of process that will enable us to deal with enquiries - @chriscroome is there some sort of ticketing system that might work?

At the moment [email protected] is an alias for the the email list, I'd suggest seeing how that works for a while and if the volume of email is such that a ticketing system is needed then we look at what our options are then, rather than spending time putting a complicated (anyone know any non-complicated ticketing system?) system in place before hand, I agree that a ticketing system would make sense if we have a lot of enquiries...

I could set up a RT server if needs be, it is very good if you mostly want to interact with the tickets via email... Or perhaps there is a suitable WordPress plugin we could use? Anyone tried WordPress Advanced Ticket System?

We might also want to consider allowing people to provide a "Subject:" line to their messages by adding a "Title" form field so it's easier to keep track of the form submissions, or perhaps we could use a select list for this? I have collected some wishlist items for the forms on the wiki, that we can consider in the New Year.

One thing I just noticed is that the North Americian tech-coop list just had a request for a quote sent to their public list, see their archives for December 2016, it's the one with the subject line "[tech-coop] Cooperative Educators Network RFP" -- this shows that this kind of thing can be done in public, so perhaps the contact form on the site should give people the option to post to the open list if they wish, as suggested in another thread?

SG

Sam Gluck Tue 3 Jan 2017 10:40AM

Looking great! Thanks to all involved!

I wonder if we could have subdomains for each of the member coops? e.g. outlandish.coops.tech

Easier to point someone to than coops.tech/co-op/outlandish

CCC

Good idea! :smiley:

This has been set this up using the domain names taken from the email addresses used for the user accounts on the site as a basis for the list of sub-domains (note that this is shorter than the list of co-ops on the site), with one exception (blakehouse rather than blake) :

  1. https://agile.coops.tech/
  2. https://blakehouse.coops.tech/
  3. https://calverts.coops.tech/
  4. https://broadband.coops.tech/
  5. https://cetis.coops.tech/
  6. https://webarchitects.coops.tech/
  7. https://gildedsplinters.coops.tech/
  8. https://glowboxdesign.coops.tech/
  9. https://gofreerange.coops.tech/
  10. https://mc3.coops.tech/
  11. https://mediaco-op.coops.tech/
  12. https://outlandish.coops.tech/
  13. https://weareopen.coops.tech/

If any additional sub-domains are needed, for any of these co-ops, for example blake.coops.tech or media.coops.tech, let me know, ideally via a /msg chrisc in Slack.

Also note that the URL's on the site can be changed, for example Agile could edit https://dev.coops.tech/co-op/agile-collective/ to https://dev.coops.tech/co-op/agile/ -- if this is done please let me know so I can update the redirect.

When the site is made live we can change the redirects to go to www.coops.tech rather than dev.coops.tech.

These redirects are hosted on a VM that Webarchitects set up a couple of months ago specifically to host HTTP redirects (with HTTPS support) so this is a good test of the scripts we wrote to generate the Nginx config etc. -- thanks for providing a concrete task for this server! :smiley:

CCC

Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative) Wed 4 Jan 2017 12:46AM

It's really great to see some co-ops adding content to the dev site, andI don't want to moan, but can I make a plea that we try not to:

  • Duplicate services, eg Web Design and Website Design (I assume these are the same thing?) and Graphic Design and Graphic Design
  • Add client logos without transparent backgrounds, I know it takes longer to edit them to make the background transparent but it does look better, if possible!
  • Add services logos that are not #FFC531

And what about copyright and attribution of the logos? I have recorded links to the originals of the services ones I have added but they all have different copyrights -- I guess we should do this properly and have a page for this...?

HR

Harry "Outlandish" Robbins Wed 4 Jan 2017 11:13AM

Well moaned Chris :)

I can't imagine it would have been a design-focused co-op that would have made the site look bad - any ideas @sionwhellens ?

Can I suggest the best course of action in future is for people to un-publish duplicate or un-finished clients or services and contact the co-op that created them to ask they finish or amend?

For now I've removed the definite duplicates: printing, graphic design, branding, marketing communications, website design - all of these had existing categories which Calverts should add themselves to.

It seems that we could probably do with either a rationalisation of services (into fewer, larger categories) or possibly some categorisation (e.g. design, data, consultancy).

Perhaps a good topic for the next meetup which I'm about to start trying to organise.

RB

Roy Brooks Wed 4 Jan 2017 12:36PM

A sound plan.

Suggest the meet also makes a start re messaging/positioning from a marketing /PR perspective too - there's some good ad-hoc work on this on the dev site already, but like graphic design, would benefit from some focus and refining

HR

Harry "Outlandish" Robbins Wed 4 Jan 2017 11:24AM

I've also trashed "forest stewardship council" which is not a technology by any stretch of the imagination. I've left @sionwhellens other blatant SEO hacks in place.

I've added all the co-ops to "Dualit" (kettle) but before we get asked, is there an ethical brand of kettles?

SG

Sam Gluck Wed 4 Jan 2017 11:27AM

If there is we should let the Met know

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