From techmeet
Techmeet 2007 summary so far
What's going on?
Techmeet 2007 is a continuation of the techmeet process initiated last year. In 2006 there was a physical meeting of tech people working in movements for social change, including but not limited to Indymedia-related stuff. The meeting took place in Sao Paulo, Brasil. IMC-related subjects included Indymedia hosting arrangements, and work on a new codebase to replace the existing Mir, sf-active, and other content management systems (CMSs).
Work continued throughout 2006, but because Indymedia lost a lot of servers and hosting in late 2006 and early 2007, a lot of tech work was diverted from the goals of the Sao Paulo techmeet process. Many hours of tech work went into finding new servers, more bandwidth, etc, to replace what was lost. As a result, discussion of the new CMS code did not proceed.
In 2007, the idea was to do a "distributed" techmeet - audio and video streams from around the world, and a series of IRC meetings. So far there have been two, and today (28 October 2007) is the third one. So far, people from meetings in Berlin, Amsterdam, Sao Paulo, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Venezuela, and Goiana have reported on their local tech initiatives, what they're experiencing, their hosting arrangements, any legal problems they're having, etc.
The CMS code discussion is the last remaining issue to be discussed during the techmeet. This is both a technical and a political question: what is possible technically? How to go about it? What do indy users want from a next-generation indymedia website? How does the website code itself influence our political processes, how we work? What are the political possibilities?
Some of the people in the Techmeet process have expressed serious concerns that these questions are currently being addressed only by a handful of geeks, and the questions are extremely important for the future of the network. This is why ryan is pushing for a lot of "advertising" on local lists, so a large and informed group of people can start to address these questions in a collective fashion.
