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The Zeitgeist Movement: Project 2.0
The Zeitgeist Movement is known for its decentralised nature.
We have many different types of people who join a chapter, a team or a project
and some who are just curious. Many different types of users.
It has come to our attention that a lot chapters and teams
have a problem with their current website.
sometimes they lack the programmers and designers
sometimes the hosting company sucks,
sometimes the back end platform doesn’t really work as it should,
and others would just like to see
a more unified place for people to work in.
These are the reasons that brought us to start the TZM 2.0
also known as 'The Phoenix Project'.
We’ve gathered a team of designers, project coordinators, programmers and others
to figure out how to build a distribution that will satisfy all of those needs.
It will be an Open Source project, based on the Drupal platform,
which utilises a bunch of very reliable and tested modules to provide such functionalities.
Open Atrium is a packaged installation of several such modules
So, this is what we are going to do:
over the past few months we’ve asked chapter members and coordinators
what features they would like to see implemented, and we wrote those on a list.
We will continue to do so with your help and support,
ensuring that what we build is what activists actually need and will use.
We will rent a dedicated managed server,
which has already been tested and confirmed to be reliable,
fast, and allows us to create individual accounts,
each one with their own login on the back end, if necessary.
For example, if a chapter joins and moves to this server,
we can give access to their programmers just to a sub directory dedicated to their chapter,
with remote login and all that is needed.
This costs about 90 euros per month.
We know, there are many 5 euros per month services out there,
but they don’t come even close to providing what this does.
We will split the costs among members who join in.
If there’s 10 chapters, 9 euros per chapter per month.
If there’s 90 of them, it’s 1 euro per chapter per month.
We’ll set up a working space in there,
where we can experiment and do all that is required to develop the platform.
Depending on how many people join the project,
it might take only a few months or several.
at the end of this process, we will have
a TZM Drupal distribution that any chapter or team can use for their purposes.
This will be a specialised platform, which will connect all chapters using it,
they will be able to share login,
send messages among members (even from other chapters), join projects and so on.
It will be supported and updated by the TZM 2.0 team,
and all the source code will be open and free for all to use.
In simple terms, this means that once the platform is ready,
setting up a chapter or a team’s website,
with your custom logo, URL, look and feel,
will only take a short amount of time
and will not require any technical knowledge or programming skills.
I know many of you might be thinking about possible transitions from your old chapter website to the new platform.
While this is technically possible, it would need to be evaluated on a per case basis,
so we can’t answer that right now.
What we want to do is empower all activists to work on cool projects,
without having to worry about websites, programming,
integration with other services and lots of other cumbersome things.
Lastly, we’ll be making instructional videos on how to use the new platform,
how to join the network and how to set up a website.
If you wish to join our team, please see the link in the description
You don’t have to be a developer to join,
just somebody interested in making this happen.
Live long and prosper
thezeitgeistmovement.com