Category Archives for Failing Forward

What’s missing and what’s next

What’s most obviously missing from a conference website is the SCHEDULE AND LISTINGS OF THE ACTUAL EVENTS AT THE CONFERENCE. And, you might note that there are no placeholder pages built out emptily and anxiously awaiting their schedule content as the organizers decide what it will be.

This is where agility comes into play — why build something before I know what the requests are for it, and how the data will come to me?

I will suggest to the people I am working on to build them in two ways:

  • Have each committee load individual workshops and performances into Google Calendar the title, time, and description of the event – then if they get requests to change it, they have access to it to change. This also allows participants to add the events to their personal Google calendars, something many people use. Perhaps I will also share <a href…> code with a link to the Bios page, and then build…
  • One Bios page on the blog that has all the photos and bios of all performers and presenters, listed alphabetically by first name because of course, fuck patriarchy.
  • I’m not sure yet if we will build pages for each individual workshop, seeing as how that text is subject to change. If its requested, we’ll use the descriptions as in the shared google forms so that no emails start flying around with content.

What else is missing? Finesse to the forums, including a Statement of Use [requested by the Collective] and then a community announcement via email lists and social media that there are forums to use, to see if people will actually use them for their intended purposes.

Resources and Fun Materials, like the entire Femme Bibliograpy one Media Team member collected and built, actual galleries, more videos on the YouTube channel [that’s displayed on the widget on the right-hand sidebar], and …

Selected Full-development resources like the sharing the Keynotes via UStream or Livestream, which then need Pages we want to set up. That will be developed in the weeks before the conference and does not need a home on the site yet, though I think they’d have a sub-page under Media and a sticky post on the front page of the site.

External resources, like more info in the Wikipedia page.

And, most importantly, we are missing a Magical CSS unicorn, like the alliedmedia.org folks have in the <meta> tags on their forums and message boards. Hmmrph.

When you spell the keynote’s name wrong and the person who volunteers to fix it breaks the site

It had to happen, especially when you are working your way through school and volunteering and perhaps too tired to pay strict enough attention to detail: someone’s name gets misspelled.

It’s not right and should be corrected, but it’s especially wrong when it’s one of the KEYNOTES of the conference, and you’ve just launched a major media campaign to alert every homosexual in North America to go to your website and learn about said keynote.

My main collaborator is a woman who has never used WordPress, she’s bottomlining the Outreach/Press Release end of the Media team, and she got the email from the Keynote first and alerted me, who was trapped at my desk at work without recourse: what happened next is that she like a total I-can-figure-this-out badass looked up the WP log-ins on the shared Google Doc we have all our log-ins on [agility over security!], navigated to the post where the offending typing occurred, and copied in corrected text.

And somehow, broke the site. Continue reading →

Forums: to build or not to build and then how the hell to build

For the past three conferences, participants had been asking for forums to try to scheme rides and housing shares, and the past web designer was unwilling to build them. Now I know why — they are unwieldy and the out-of-the-box solutions are not exactly beautiful and they don’t always work how you want them to.

For a first attempt, I thought fuck forums they are so 2002. I’ll just install BUDDYPRESS AND WE’LL CREATE AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE IN THIS WEBSITE. After realising how non-agile and unachievable that was, I installed bbPress, the forum software that runs with BuddyPress. And this is how it looked, and all it did, note that 50 days had gone by without a use or a peep:

This bbPress forum did not work, so I went back to WordPress.org and began searching for an alternative, thinking perhaps that there were none at all. But, I found this, Mingle Forum, and downloaded and installed in in the /plugins folder on our WordPress site.

Upon first install, it was the default blue color that “all links are, so I went into the Forum’s Forums [meta!] and found out that the design treatment on a forum is called a skin, and downloaded the first red one I found. It kind of matches our site, enough that I am willing to go with it:

Continue reading →

Using Google Forms: failing forward for free

When we decided that we’d use Google as our collaborative software I was bummed that the Evil Empire would be able to data mine our project — and that the possibility of the “cloud” evaporating was present — but I relaxed when I realized it would solve one of the major problems I as a web designer was facing: FORMS.

I *could* take hours to build a form and then have the input emailed to each responsible committee but that sounded like it would take a lot of administrative work and could go wrong at many places. But with Our New Friend Google Docs, committees could make a form tailored to their needs, share it with the Collective’s gmail, and also capture all the responses themselves.

So easy! So amazingly easy that the Performance committee form-builder even taught herself to shut down the form when the Call closed. Now if only the web designer could learn to hide the sidebars so they don’t flow over the input area of the form…

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

Agility in Site Development

THEORY: When design is agile, we’ve produced “less than” and not taken too many ideas into the mix, stayed within or below scope, waited for users to respond to product, not overdeveloped before getting user information.

For example, the previous website was a Joomla! build from former developer, heavy and not accessible by anyone who didn’t know the Joomla! CMS [not that the designer was willing to share a login, but anyway].

How was this development agile?

  1. The first web presence implementation was just one HTML page [no screenshot available] — just getting the Save The Date and conference theme “out there” [and collecting SEO on the URL]
  2. Second was Twenty10 WP theme [the default theme] with a header and a few pages — just getting the Call for Submissions forms up and public without any major design work
  3. Third implementation of WP Page Lines framework theme with more design, bells n whistles — adding in pages that were requested, more attractive design, and integrating social media presence.

Non-agile ideas that were researched and discarded:

Three similar conference sites

Other conferences also have web presences, and three that are relevant in terms of community to outreach to, size of conference, and media justice analysis are:

Allied Media Conference [annual, this would be an example of full-development ideal]

  • http://alliedmedia.org
  • made by http://theworkdept.com/#agility  in Drupal … of course.
  • In an ideal full build we’d have a drupal site that was mad fancy but it would take so much development and user-assistance admin that it’s not worth it for an all-volunteer event

Butch Voices [bi-annual, an example of agile or mid-range development]

Queer Yo Mind Conference [37signals-agile development example]

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.