Category Archives for Accessibility

The “Old Site”

The 2006-2010 Conference Site was created, developed, designed, updated, maintained, and the server space and URL were owned by one person who is no longer working on the project — and who is recalcitrant to share the original domain name of the project [new-defunct femmecollective.com] or to copy the old site or share logins for others to update it. When it was time for the 2012 conference to create a web presence in 2011, we had to start from scratch…and I was the person on the Collective with the most web-creation ability and capacity.

Old Femme Con Site

Media Justice and Open Source Solutions

We had a six-month check-in on How The Technology Was Working and to have a check-in on the data-mining creepiness that is the Googleverse.

Google Docs was acting buggy on some older computers [including mine] and from a class-accessibility standpoint, that was problematic: it’s important that participants feel they can “afford to participate” and that barriers be addressed and acknowledged.

Someone suggested that people who had trouble with google docs just “install google chrome” I took that as an opportunity to let folks know that g-chrome tracks your web movements more efficiently than any browser before and recommended Firefox with TACO add-ons. An example of a slightly didactic but gentle way to say this is:

Accessibility: Process and Outcomes

How was this development accessible?

Pushback on designer/web-creator’s role as a corrective to gatekeeping of former web developer and as a site of power for the input of individuals and committees:

  • Admin Logins shared with many [some security measures in place]
  • Author/user logins shared with all – ability to post to wp blog universal
  • Insistence that committees create their own content for web pages via shared google docs means that many people can input into the content and easily add and edit to it — more voices in the process of developing.

Why is building in wordpress accessible for this project? Because so many people are able to use WP and feel comfortable in it already or quickly after beginning to use it:

  • WP is accessible to many people at various states of comfort with technology due to its WYSIWYG interface, semi-obvious taxonomies, and [relative] build-out simplicity.

 

Collaborative Technology Reasoning: Beg, Borrow, Buy

Why collaborate with a specific technology? Why not just get our work done some other way and all hand it in? For starts, in a collective–or any horizontal project–there’s no manager to hand it in to, no boss, no one to organize the work for you but you. Getting organized is a systems-level problem that best be addressed as soon as possible.

And for projects that have principles that base around justice, equality, accessibility, and collective or direct-democratic decision making, the choice of platforms is a political decision.

For the 2012 Femme Conference, we needed to set up a system where 14 core organizers and 30 subcommittee members can work together — both in terms of accessibility and capacity. Systems we chose thus had to be not overly hard to learn or use, but still must allow for organization and effectiveness.

We looked at possibly using:

I tried to get people to use Crabgrass [open source!] or Basecamp [more useful!], but the request from the majority of the other organizers was that most people had existing Gmail accounts and were familiar with the interface, so we went with G-docs

  • Theory: Choosing the achievability of agility and accessibility over principles, choosing to fight battles later with other technologies. For example, I decided to force WP participation rather than “force” the use of a platform that no one would use.

In an ideal build we’d have Crabgrass or Open Atrium sitting on a Drupal site, but in an ideal world we’d be paying someone to build this. Better to pick that which will actually happen and — most importantly, that which people are willing to interact with.

  •  Theory: I like to occassionally remind people that Gmail is a “begged” resource that datamines our every word typed in, just to raise awareness of the issues in using “free” software that’s not Free/Libre software.

Community Participation:

The Femme Conference project has a built-in, existing community of 14 core organizers and about 35 total organizers who would be interacting with this media, either by creating blog posts, content for the web pages, or using the social media to let people know about the conference.

There is an additional community of several hundred people who will be visiting the site for information on participating in the the conference at performers, workshop presenters and attendees.

Theory: We had to pick a technology that community members would be familiar with and comfortable using that also allowed for the needed organization and dissemination of data.

Theory bonus: Organization and Dissemination are two of the three aspects of power-shifting digital technology, the other being production

Problem Statement: Develop Collaborative Technology for a Conference

This project’s goal is to create an internal communications system as well as a public social media and web presence for an LGBTQ conference which can be maintained by many, and which is manageable by an asynchronous, all-volunteer organizing collective.

A major goal of this project is to create a collaborative and horizontal web presence which is decentralized and which many people have access to and control[s] over, instigates interactivity and buy-in, while maintaining the safety of personal data [email addresses, server logins] as needed. For political reasons, it is important to create a space where many types of users feel welcomed to post on the blog, and for other users to find accessibility information on the site.

For marketing and registration purposes, we wanted to create a site that attracts people to the conference itself .

Lastly, members have requested a rideboard and housing-share board for the site. Questions about need for monitoring and safety have come up, so these boards should avoid spam and lurking, while remaining easy-to-use for a range of users.