crew meeting minutes

listserv's not up yet and i don't want to lose momentum on this, so i'm posting it here. the following are the results of the 03/09/03 jakeneck crew meeting. the evening's attendees were: mobius, aphid, crandan, foozmeat, abstractpoetic & bycenator.

[initally written for the listserv] jakeneck operates on consensus. as team members, your input is invaluable and essential to our project's success. if you would rather not clutter your inbox with this discussion because you feel you have little input, feel free to unsubscribe. we won't hold it against you. but if you've got feelings regarding the following resolutions, please toss 'em into the ring and join the discussion.

at the very least, read this post in its entirety so you can see the direction in which we'd like to take the site.


immediate issues:

• content -- we are in consensus that the postings have been a little too politico-centric and that the rampant leftist radicalism is both frustrating and depressing to our visitors. we want to tone down on the politics just a bit, and focus a little more on culture: art, science, music, etc. we want to keep people informed, for certain. but we want to give them what to smile about too. lord knows in these dark ages we could use a little pick-me-up.
  
  with the creation of a scratchboard (see below) we might be able to tone down on the politics by sharing links and waiting til someone's got something strong to say who combines those links into one post. this is a temporary fix while we work out a long-term solution.
  
  we should also try to be a little nicer to commentors who disagree with our views. we're not winning any converts by tearing into them.

future software development:

• scratchboard -- a single, shared textarea with a submit/save button that allows blogmembers to leave notes and reserve links for later postings.
• radio station -- ray, prete & i used to do a bi-weekly radio show on the old shtv. we'd like to revise this concept but more democratically by employing a system similar to andromeda but using fooze's code. blog members would have the ability to upload segments to a web folder which can then be played as one continuous stream. thus we can have a weekly radio show that does not need to be edited together and which is archived over time. this can also be used to create an ongoing exquisite corpse project.
• advanced commenting system -- break out the commenting system into a threaded message board. each month will be a folder and each post will be an individual topic. when a person hits comment they will be taken to the threaded message board.
• truncating posts -- we want longer posts to be clipped to one paragraph and then given a [more] link which breaks out the post to either another page or expands it on the current page.
• photo gallery -- i'm just throwing this in... it'd be nice if we can upload images to galleries.
• filtering -- add topics to posts. allow users to filter posts by topic or blogger.
• "stream of consciousness" metasystem (this is the biggie) -- imagine there were three tiers to the website:
  
  level 1. standard blogging, just as it exists now, but with a few basic enhancements.
  
  level 2. metablogging. blogmembers will have the ability to go to level 1 and link posts of a similar vein, perhaps using checkboxes and a submit button. it will preserve the original material on level 1, but merge the content into one post on level 2, attributing the original authors and bidirectionally linking to their original posts. the blogger will then be able to edit the content of the metapost and formulate a more comprehensive post from the original material. this feature will also apply to the comments area. comments can be broken out and contributed to level 2 posts and their authors attributed as well.
  
  level 3. metametablogging. double the pleasure of level 2, but adds the ability to integrate more multimedia content and to alter the display of the page itself, so you end up with more permanent features, such as this piece.
  
  the original idea behind jakeneck was to create more comprehensive feature content, as opposed to recycling the blogdex top 20, as most blogs do now. this system would allow those of the blogcrew who are happy linkdumping to continue doing so, and those of us who want to work on the bigger picture to do so as well. thus, instead of recycling memes, we consolidate them into new ones, and get listed on blogdex ourselves.

please post your responses to the comment field and we'll try to shift the convo over to our listserv once it's up and running. i'll post a permalink to this post as soon as it starts sliding down the page.