Tag Archives for problem

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 →

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.