There are a lot of moving pieces in building a website, most of which receive very little thought. If i change the background image, you can see the result. Whether or not you know what it was before, it contributes to the overall look and feel. Much of what happens lands on the surface as such. Blogs show the thought process. Some, such as my last post on lying down, might touch on a philosophical notion or even an attempt at a poetic interpretation of a thought process.
Of course, what comes to the surface is only a small portion of what actually happens. There are massive questions of what is being built, how it can get built, whether or not it should even get built and other nuts and bolts considerations of what this is trying to become. None of those questions are easy to answer.
Some time ago, i had a vision of what this site is about trying to build and what it needs to be if it is going to be anything; a complex amalgamation of a practical organizational tool that helps people understand the complexities of climate change coupled with an artistic vision of how to rebuild one tiny little corner of the internet so that people feel compelled to get and stay engaged.
Of course, practical advice on how to build such a thing steers away from building such a thing.
To develop engagement when there is nothing to be engaged in is a difficult thing. It comes to charisma and enthusiasm. It comes to me helping you believe in something you have never seen. The only other way this works is to show you the thing you didn't know you needed.
The honest strategy is to pursue both elements at once. On the one hand, to create honest content that shows the core of the idea to you so that all the bits and links add up to something a search engine or a friend might be willing to show you. On the other hand, to follow the research and ask the questions of what it takes to implement a web engine for innovation when you are starting from square one.
I picture the visualization on the opening page so clearly. A color coded three dimensional virtual model of chemical and physical nature of climate change, animated with the progress humanity is making in undoing the damage we have done, shrinking the atoms of a complexly folded molecule. Each atom linking to a matter of fact explanation and a simple set of ideas and solutions to build towards a better future. A place where joining in the game of chipping away at the problems offers aesthetically pleasing rewards and a chance at having documented ownership in steering humanity away from apocalyptic degradation.
But how to build such a thing?
There are a surprising number of projects out there that offer pathways forward. Each has it's own pluses and minuses. Do we chose the engine written in perl or php? are those the only options? Does it make a bit of different if the end user functionality is there? It might surprise you to know that Operation Burningwater already has test wiki's running. Wikidot has the promise of willingness to host a worthy wiki for free. foswiki needs hosting but offers the promise of extensions, addons and mashups to build on the framework of a wiki and offer later functionality like mind web style visualizations to navigate the engine. The mediawiki engine has proven itself capable of huge amounts of content and traffic, but has it shown the ability to innovate and move into the web 3.0 environment that none of these options have yet seemed to touch upon.
Every image needs inspiration the same as every question needs research.
Take a moment to consider the image above. A complex mechanism has many moving parts. Where do you fit in? I have no doubt that you are the piece that helps this machine move forward.