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Project Proposal

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Norman Khine edited this page Jun 6, 2013 · 2 revisions

##Introduction

The overriding priority of the global website of the Zeitgeist Movement is to advance the goals of the ZM, that is to say, to bring about a global resource-based economy for the fulfillment of basic human needs across the planet.

For most people the global website is the principle point of contact with the Movement, and so it's essential that new visitors receive an impression of the ZM that is clear, concise and inspiring, which motivates them to discover more and become active and effective.

For committed members the website represents an evolving information source and a means of contact and collaboration with other members. As much as possible, it should stimulate and facilitate activism at an individual level and provide the viable tools for all kinds of cooperative teamwork at the local, regional, national and global levels.

Online collaboration and activism is not a substitute for action in the world, but it offers significant assistance in realizing this. Information by itself cannot achieve social change, but, as a Movement, we recognize its crucial importance in understanding the present and in building our vision for the future.

This paper is a consultation draft-proposal for restructuring the global website, with the desired aim of substantially increasing involvement, motivation, collaboration and effective focussed activism among new and existing members of the Zeitgeist Movement. The functions needed by the ZM on its website are delineated and the existing website examined to see how it fulfills them. Where a new or improved function is proposed, a method of incorporating it is suggested.

This consultation draft is a semi-final document and it is being circulated throughout the Movement for final comments. This process is to ensure that all members, chapters, teams and other stakeholders will be positively served by the project. All are invited to provide feedback for any improvements.

The time is now!

##Our goals

The global website is a fundamental tool of the Zeitgeist Movement for imparting its vision to potential new members and for communication among its committed members. It needs to serve several roles, each of which needs to be clearly delineated so that the structure of the website can best fulfill them.

One theme that unites these specific purposes is that of connection. We need recruits to connect with the ZM. Members need to connect with each other, especially to build cooperation across national borders, which we realize to be artificial and divisive. Individually, ZM members need to regularly reconnect with their own conscience, to advance their own focused self-critical development and deepen their understanding of the movement’s aims and strategies. We all need to connect to current reality, the state of society and of the environment, which is always changing, so this connection invites continual renewal also.

Hence the present working title of the framework under development is Zeitgeist Global Connect.

A global website for the Zeitgeist Movement needs to:

  1. Awaken the conscience of potential new members with a clear and concise presentation of our urgent concern for the present world and of our vision for the future.

  2. Present the evidence, in summary and in detail, using primary sources and up-to-date supporting material of all types in clear and comprehensible formats, easily accessible by users of all types.

  3. Allow new members to orient themselves easily within the ZM in regards to chapters, projects and teams, and to provide clear paths to increased awareness, involvement, activism and collaboration.

  4. Enable active members to communicate globally.

  5. Provide an environment for members to focus appropriately, effectively and productively on the Movement's goals and strategies.

  6. Stimulate projects and collaborations among members, chapters and teams globally.

  7. Permit global coordination of our activities.

  8. Be a credible presence on the internet and help build links with other credible, compatible and parallel organizations and movements.

  9. Unify the ZM and embody the unity of the global human family and our mutual interconnection, regardless of national or other boundaries.

##Where we are now

How well does the present provision satisfy the requirements as stated above?

The current global website fulfills some of the required functions, but in other respects falls short of enabling the Zeitgeist Movement to fulfill its true potential. A brief run-through of the current site's principle features follows to illustrate this.

There is a comprehensive amount of information available to the user on the main page, but the hierarchy of importance of each link is unclear, except perhaps that the Orientation Guide is at the top. Apart from the provision of media (video, audio, PDFs) and the updated Movement news, the design, layout and navigation of this page (and of the site as a whole) are sub-optimal, giving the impression of neglect. The mission statement is too low on the page, and too long. Logos are too large. Links on the right hand side are duplicated elsewhere. It is not clear why links to media files need to be repeated in the left navigation bar on every page. Some pages are empty and some functions are broken.

The About page is too long and needs to be organized better. Information from the FAQ is repeated. Layout is sub-optimal. The wiki is broken. Some links are duplicated or dead. The Toolkit consists mostly of the same material from the lefthand navigation. Teams are clearly listed, but information about Projects is scattered, out-of-date and poorly organized. Archives of Z-Day should not logically be under Take Action, which should only be prospective.

Text content within the site is often poorly edited and proofread. Too many definitions are offered in the negative and within a reactive, problem-solving mode, rather than clear positive goals and strategies described without any disconcerting defensiveness. (The new user has no knowledge of trolling history in the ZM and it is not appropriate or effective to state one's approach in negative terms). The Knowledge Base suffers from this same affliction: a focus on the negative. What are the positive results which these structures seek to foster? They need to be stated clearly and objectively. It is suggested that all important text accord with the principles of nonviolent communication and of plain language (aka Plain English) .

Contact is not really what it says. The Community is underused by members, bug-ridden and lacking some social networking features which would make it a productive tool. TZMNewsletter is a successful, if so far irregular, project and it is rather tucked away on the website. There is ambiguity over the term Newsletter, as it is used to refer to both the TZMNewsletter magazine and the email bulletins.

The Forum appears to elicit the most activity from registered users. There is a perception that it is vulnerable to a lack of focus and that, as the most visibly active section of the global website, it therefore presents the ZM in a poor light. This argument (which also applies to TeamSpeak) has some truth, but there is a definite danger that taking a hammer to crack a bothersome nut would deprive the ZM of vital expressions of the genuine activity and interest of its members.

The current website is USA-centric: it is the Global/USA website. While this arrangement may have some historically valid or perhaps exigent reason, it presents as an anomaly now. It is illogical for a genuinely global website to default to one nation.

In addition to the global website, there are other tools used by the Movement, including Teamspeak for voice conferencing and the Wiki used by the Movement's Linguistic Team.

Outside of the ZM's official internet presence, there are a number of parallel websites set up by ZM members, such as Zeitnews, TZMNetwork and TZMEducation, some of which are already demonstrating their viability and value to the Movement, whether officially recognized by the ZM or not. This brings up the issue of duplication: there is perhaps a fine balance to be struck between a healthy diversity of approaches on the one hand and on the other the need for a cohesive and coherent synchronization for the Movement to be effective. We do need to avoid dispersal, fragmentation, dilution and unproductive duplication of efforts.

Members, chapters and teams are also using various other online tools including Google Groups, Google Docs, Pirate Pad, SyncIn, DropBox etc. The official ZM FaceBook page registers over 300,000 friends and the Movement's YouTube channel is evidently successful.

According to the global website, the Zeitgeist Movement has over half a million supporters registered therein. It must be admitted that only a small fraction of this number is effectively active in the Movement. Let's try and improve that.

##Our strategy

We propose to restructure the global website of the Zeitgeist Movement to improve coordination and increase the movement's effectiveness at local, regional, and global levels.

The priority is for members to be able to come together and collaborate using the global website; the structure and the tools should be available for this. It is partly in response to perceived shortcomings of the current global site that the other websites mentioned above have been created and third-party tools employed.

New and existing ZM chapters require a web presence which can be created, run, customized and improved easily. One important focus of the present proposal is to provide the resources for them to be able to create and maintain such a presence without the need for additional server resources, domain name registration or other technical facilities. The global website should provide these features in a robust way, using proven tools that allow for local management and adaptation to local circumstances. It is not proposed that there be any compulsion; those chapters which already have, or are able to create, online facilities are free to do so, within the general chapter guidelines already available (see references below).

Equally important is to facilitate international teams and projects, and to enable intercommunication between chapters, teams and projects. Medium-term ZM aspirations, such as implementing a resource bank, think tank or solutions project, could have their inception under this provision.

It is proposed that for each member there will be a single login and password required for the whole system, although the functions available on the website will depend on the user's status: guest, registered user, coordinator or site administrator. Thus many of the collaboration and networking features will only be available to registered users. Chapter and team coordinators have an appropriate level of access to management features.

To avoid proliferation of domain names and login pages, it is proposed that all features be accessed via a single domain name and that provision be allowed for existing spin-offs (zmdev.net, zmlingteam.org, linguisticteam.org etc) and their functions to be hosted at that domain, as far as possible.

Members should have the ability to customize the features on their personal homepage within the global website, to facilitate more effective access to relevant news, information and tools.

Arising from the consultation were the requests for specific features which the current global site does not offer: collaboration tools such as project management and wiki (document collaboration); social networking; news aggregation.

It is proposed that the US-focus of the global site be removed and that the USA national chapter should develop an autonomous web-presence in line with other national chapters.

There is a need for the ZM to improve its focus and effectiveness, and consideration must be given to the appropriate ways in which the global website can help accomplish this. The issue of requirements for user registration is outside the scope of this proposal, and it may be that the present system of a "knowledge test" about the ZM, before granting Forum access, is the appropriate model to carry forward to the redeveloped website, although it should be noted that this system has not entirely prevented irrelevant or counterproductive use of that service.

Consideration of the design and interface of the global website will follow from the functions required of it by the ZM. Effective practice in website application separates form from functionality, with the form arising from the functionality, as described here: "Model–view–controller (MVC) is a software architecture, currently considered an architectural pattern used in software engineering. The pattern isolates "domain logic" (the application logic for the user) from the user interface (input and presentation), permitting independent development, testing and maintenance of each (separation of concerns)".

The working team is currently evaluating the application Open Atrium 1.0 as the platform for the global website. Open Atrium is a packaged distribution of Drupal, which runs on the Linux Apache web server, using PHP and SQL. All these applications are open-source. Open Atrium is ready to use upon installation and can then be extensively customized using existing or custom-built Drupal modules. Drupal has a large active developing community and many different features are available. A preliminary survey suggests that Drupal can in fact provide all the proposed features and that Open Atrium provides a flexible and expandable base from which to launch.

Any plan must consider as a priority the availability of long-term volunteers to administer, moderate, maintain and continue developing the website. We envisage a team being formed to embody the principles of a learning organization, as defined by Peter Senge:

  • Systems thinking
  • Personal mastery
  • Mental modeling
  • Shared vision
  • Team learning
  • Personal agency and
  • Shared leadership.

####Aspects to consider

Below is an outline of the functional dimensions of the proposed global website, incorporating specific features suggested by ZM members during the consultation process:

  • Information management
    • ZM vision, principles and aims
    • ZM news
    • ZM media materials
    • Steps to activism
      • Presentation of easy-to-do immediate actions
    • Educational materials
    • ZM organizational structure
      • Chapters
      • Teams
      • Projects
      • Personnel
      • Membership
      • Map and statistics
        • Online users display
    • Question and answer service
    • Archive
    • Parallel organizations and movements
  • Project management
    • Project proposal and implementation system
    • Collaboration tools
    • Decision-making or polling features
    • Specified project development
      • Town Hall meetings
      • Resource bank
      • Think tank
      • Solutions project
  • Team management
    • Chapter coordination, access and local contact
    • Chapter search
    • Chapter creation process
    • Calendars
      • Voice meetings calendar (TeamSpeak)
  • Social networking
    • Reputation/trust-building
    • Secure communication
    • Short message service (aka tweeting)
  • Content management
    • User contributions
      • Forum
      • Blog
      • Document upload
    • User personalization
      • Homepage customization
      • Subscription and notification management
      • Recent activity
      • Latest news
      • Favorites menu
      • Search/filter tools
  • Integration
    • Single ZM login globally (e.g. OpenID)
    • News and information aggregation
      • Zeitnews
      • Science, technology and innovation
      • Social breakdown and protest
      • Transition and resilience
    • Localization and targeting
      • Chapter information and contacts
      • Calendar
    • Translation
    • Integration with other ZM websites
    • Incorporation of compatible third-party tools
  • Design
    • Esthetics, logos, images
      • Mutable logo (as per Google) with clickable mutable info
    • Interface accessibility guidelines
    • Help and bubble hints
  • System tools & technical approach
    • Databases
    • Security and security testing
    • Email management
    • Hosting & server provision including use of peer-to-peer, cloud and 389 directory server (LDAP) services
    • Mobile device features
  • Organizational features
    • Roles and responsibilities
    • Timetable for roll-out
    • Schedule for maintenance
    • Oversight and administration

##Credits This paper is submitted as part of the ZM 2.0 Website Redesign/Phoenix Project, initiated by Federico Pistono (Italian National Coordinator) and includes observations, technical suggestions and feature requests from the global website forum and wiki threads (references below).

Project Coordinator: Federico Pistono. Project Co-managers: Nick Polimeni (Boldhawk); Pete (AxiomEmissary) (now retired from project). Development Supervisor: David Z (ArtsFantasy). Proposal drafted by Pete F (big salad). Project members are listed here.

##References

The original version of this document can be found here.

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