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

Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative) Public Seen by 478

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.

Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative) Thu 5 Jan 2017 6:38PM

Harry said:

I've also trashed "forest stewardship council" which is not a technology by any stretch of the imagination.

Fair enough, there is perhaps a case for something like a "member of" category for things like this? For example Webarchitects is a member of Nominet, Janet, Radical Routes, Co-operatives UK, ORG and I expect some other other organisations I don't recall right now.

Matthew said:

I would really like to see is a new post type called "collaborations".

I wonder if that might be best done using blog posts on the site, it could then contain as much or as little details as needed and screenshots, hyperlinks etc etc

Roy Brooks Fri 6 Jan 2017 7:47AM

Ditto to Matthew - eg GS & Calverts currently working together on .coop
Showing we 'walk the talk' is always good for confidence

Sion Whellens (Principle Six/Calverts) Mon 9 Jan 2017 6:02PM

Hah! FSC and ISO are both technologies (FSC for verifying the origin of materials through a certified chain of custody). But if course this brings us to the elephant of what we mean by 'technology' ...

Matthew Parsons Thu 5 Jan 2017 3:26PM

Hey all - what I would really like to see is a new post type called "collaborations". This would reference:

The 2 or more co-ops involved
Which co-op was the initiator
The client/s
A short description of the collaboration

This would be really great to see as proof of the value of the network

Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative) Wed 18 Jan 2017 8:56PM

Could we get the https://dev.coops.tech/ site ready for a launch party at the https://2017.open.coop/ social being planned on this thread?

That would give us a month to sort out the issues there are with the site, I think the main ones are:

Getting the two forms working.
Agreeing and signing off on the text on the "Our Manifesto" page, the "About CoTech" page and on the "Join CoTech" page.
Removing (no need to delete they can simply be made to only show in the admin interface) all the co-ops who haven't got their pages into a presentable state.

Other minor issues like the slightly broken 404 pages are not critical, but I think the above things are.

How is that for a plan?

Harry "Outlandish" Robbins Thu 19 Jan 2017 10:30AM

Sounds good to me. I believe I've got to get a flight on day two of the event to run a hackday so if the launch party could be Thursday that would be awesome :)

I think the site is awesome - hats off to the teams that made and launched it. The only other thing I've noticed is a bug where the menu sometimes goes a bit funky on scroll. I'll get someone here to have a look at it.

Does anyone object to me inviting the bona fide workers tech co-ops who were not able to attend the event to add profiles to the site?

Roy Brooks Thu 19 Jan 2017 1:14PM

A good plan we'd say - grow the family. Forza! #coops

Chris Croome (Webarchitects Co-operative) Thu 19 Jan 2017 11:13AM

I think the plan is for the social to be Thursday night, I also couldn't make it if it is on Friday night.

@harryrobbins said:

Does anyone object to me inviting the bona fide workers tech co-ops who were not able to attend the event to add profiles to the site?

Not at all, I assumed that this was always the plan, software.coop didn't come to the event and, as far as I know, have not been involved in this project in any way, and are on there... I'll chase them up to see if they can be encouraged to get involved, they really should be, they have been doing this for longer than most of us! :smiley:

Poll Created Wed 1 Feb 2017 3:33PM

Do we agree the CoTech Manifesto, Join and About pages? Closed Wed 15 Feb 2017 3:02PM

The proposed site has Our Manifesto, an About Us page and a Join Us page are we happy to sign off on the current wording of these pages?

If you think anything needs changing please edit the copies on the wiki and post here to say what you have changed and why:

I have set this proposal to run for two weeks so we have time to get the site ready for the proposed launch party on the Thursday night of Open 2017: Platform Cooperatives.