Is this thing on? (An overview up to today)

THINKTANKING

I've been interested in thinktanks for a long time.  I love working in a group, watching as ideas bounce around and become ever more developed.  Sometimes I like to be the leader and sometimes I like to be a synergistic supporter, sitting on the sideline, handing out towels and Gatorade as needed.  Both can be extremely rewarding and wonderfully entertaining, but they can also be hard to find.

The Interwebs have provided the ability to bring groups together from all over the world both synchronously and asynchronously.  Doing so a decade ago was both time and money intensive, but the open-source movement has provided systems where you can set platforms up with a small investment (or no investment if you will accept more limitations and less control where you keep your content).  The more work you're willing to do, the less expensive it might be to set up and run.

THE ORIGINAL IDEA

We have lots of ideas.  Some of us want a new recipe for chicken and some of us want to build and travel on the Starship Enterprise.  The issue seems to be that, once you dream, is your path to fulfilling the dream actually possible or is the time/money/technology/belief/creativity divide too great to achieve?  I think, had I not been working as an educional technologist, I might have had the idea and eventually tossed it aside as being unreasonable.  Since new open-source technology platforms were maturing, why not flesh it out?

So I started thinking through what I wanted.  The ideas came pretty fast: I wanted a site where users could write stories about how they view the future.  I wanted to link the stories via specific area of focus (I didn't know what vocabularies and terms were, yet) so people could filter down to what they wanted to read, be it based on personal interest or for research.  I then asked myself why people would come to the site and realized the best way was to offer a news feed: a blog.  Then, I liked the idea of a wiki, because so much fiction informs our ideas of the future, it might be cool to develop something full of reviews explaining the value of watching, reading, etc... a specific piece of media for ideas.  

Seems pretty easy, right?  Site, shared content publishing, blog, wiki.  Some links to Amazon to help pay for it.  No problem?  Not exactly.

GETTING STARTED

Back in 2004 or so, the two up-and-coming CMS options were Joomla and Drupal.  Joomla seemed a bit easier to use and more feature filled at install, so I gave it a try.  After endless database implosions (I learned to back up SQL and server folders pretty fast), I gave up.  Drupal didn't seem any better it had its own problems.  When my wife sent to grad school, I realized it was time to cease and desist and see what the future held.

Well, the future gave me Tikiwiki and I fell in love.  This was around 2006-7.  I discovered Tikiwiki had a single installation which would provide the wiki, a blog interface and lots of bells and whistles.  I registared regardingtomorrow.com and started building and did a pretty good job.  But while I built, I realized the application just didn't have enough features and modules were few and far between.  I liked the information and plans, but couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger on starting the site.  It felt unfinished and I was afraid I would have to move to a different platform, which would be insanely difficult or insanely expensive.  I shelved it for later, waiting to see how Tikiwiki developed going forward.  

I'm glad I waited, because the Tikiwiki developers disabled some features as the app matured.  They removed some features (I don't remember which) I felt were necessary, but they claimed the user base wasn't.  Back to square one, but at least I had a better idea of the final product.

DRUPAL, PART DEUX

I moved to a new job in autumn of '09 (Educational Communciation Specialist) and one of my first efforts was to build a new website for the Centre for Teaching and Learning that met accessibility minimums for the Accessible Ontario Desabilities Act.  I wasn't thinking of the Regarding Tomorrow project at the time, but I found myself up to my hips in CMS systems comparing Drupal, Joomla, Tikiwiki among many, many others.  Needing to meet AODA requirements on a deadline (it could cost us $5000 per day if our site didn't meet them), combined with how interested I was in simplicity, I sent with Drupal as it was reported to meet 3WC and WAI requirements out of the gate.  I later was told Joomla did the same, but it was a debated issue and I'm glad I went with Drupal.

Using Drupal 6, I learned a looooot about the platform that year, going so far as to set up multiple test instances and writing an internal guidebook on exactly which features were enabled, how the site was put together, down to screenshots of which checkboxes were enabled.  I built 6 sites overall, cloning each for different groups (I was wary of multi-siting, that something breaking in one could bring them all down).  

In time, I realized I had enough skill to go back to Regarding Tomorrow and make it a reality.

SITE CONTRUCTION

I'll keep this brief and flesh out the details in another post.  But I want to mention that designing and building a site like this, even once, it a pretty daunting task.  I'm using something built for use, with thousands of people writing code and helping with support, and it's taken 100's of hours to get to the finish line (and I'm not done yet).  Even with millions, something like Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, etc... still requires a lot of vision and a lot of failure to get something worth having.  A friend asked me about settings up a similar site and, though I felt bad with the answer, I was quite truthful that it would take a massive amount of time and frustration to build something this complex.

What does that mean?  If you have a dream, go for it.  But be aware of where you stand.  I'm lucky to studied in one of the top Educational Technology programs in the world.  It certainly isn't a requirement and doesn't mean someone without such a background can't do the same (many have and more), but it gave me a great foundation from which to start.  The less background you have with technology, the open source movement, properly requesting support and bugs, etc... the greater the challenge.  But these things can be learned with enough patience.