Welcome!

We believe the development of the Social Forum's Internet and technology capability should be an exercise in collaborative planning and development by the entire Social Forum organizing community. For more information about our philosophy and how we see our role, feel free to look at our technology plan.

If you are a Social Forum Organizer and you would like to make a request to the technology committee, please submit your request as a tech issue. The best way to have your support request addressed is to have a representing member of your committee join our meetings. For information on how to join our meetings, please click here. We meet weekly on Sundays, addressing requests based on their level of urgency. The first hour of the meeting (4 - 5 pm EST) will be specifically for organizers who would like to bring an issue or request to the table. You can get a sense of what we are working on by looking at our list of issues. Please feel encouraged to submit issues there. In addition, if you would like to email us, you can email to tech@ussocialforum.org. Keep in mind that we will be prioritizing technology requests that we recieve through our tech request portal.

If you are interested in helping us out, we're always looking for people with a wide range of technology experience, from beginner to admin. See below for ways to get involved.

National Planning Committee Members

Please read the guidelines to interfacing with the USSF Tech Team.

Ways to get involved:

0) register on the site so that you have a login. Once you have done this, submit a need (link below) to have access to more things on the site. It is important that we know what your skills are so that we can give you the right level of permissions on the site.

1) Catch up to the work of the group by reading our TechPlan.

2) Submit a need, a bug, or a task for us here. If you want more information about this process, go here.

3) Catch up with the latest discussion in the group by reading our meeting notes.

4) Join our on-line meetings via SILC (the Secure Internet Live Conferencing protocol). More specific instructions are here. We meet on Sunday's at 4pm EST. The SILC connection is always live, so it is encouraged that you practice logging on before a meeting (as no one will be available to help you during the meeting).

If you have any trouble at all getting your SILC program up and running, please post to the tech email list for help.

Adding Content Tutorial

We offer a tutorial on how to add content to the site. Save/download the file to your computer and print it out for easy reference.

Note: Most modern computers come with software that can read PDF files. If you are unable to open the file, you may need to download a PDF reader (the most commonly used one is a proprietary software called Adobe Acrobat Reader) for free.

Non-proprietary software is important for all of us to use in the spirit of creating and supporting a global collective commons of 'open source' software that is democratically accesible to all. It works just as well as the proprietary software (Acrobat Reader), and is free!

Wikipedia has a list of PDF readers that includes free and non-proprietary PDF readers.

It also has a good starting point to learn more about open source software and the open source movement.

If you want to download Acrobat Reader anyhow, click here.

Please send any questions to webcontent@ussf2007.org.

Using the staging server and svn

If you are hacking the site - please see our directions for using SVN and the staging server

ICT Participation Principles

0) We are friendly.

1) We are open to having people get involved at whatever skill level they are capable of.

2) This means that there are no dumb questions. The that the group as a whole will join in to make sure that people get access to the list-serve and to the SILC meetings, and are able to find work-plans, meeting notes, and other documentation about the project.

3) It is important, in order to plug newbie's in effectively, that we have an understanding of who you are, your experience level, your interests, and your understanding of where/how you will be able to contribute to this kind of project.

4) If you have experience using drupal, it is important that you say so. These are the tools that we are developing with, and we are eager to plug in folks who are already familiar with them.

5) If you get access to the backend of the CMS, and you see something you could contribute, or a mistake somewhere, be sensitive to the work that others have done, and ask before making any big changes. Once you make changes or add something, communicate that to the group.

6) Know that there is much work and discussion that has already gone into the forming of this project. If you see an improvement that could be made, bring it up with some humility knowing that the group is making a lot of decisions as a body, and that we might be in the middle of discussing very issue that you are bringing to the fore.