According to my Gmail archive, on July 2 of last year, Sheriff Joshua M. Neff emailed a bunch of Library Society of the World folks to let us know that the awesome Blake Carver (host of this site and many others) had set up an embryonic LSW site running on Drupal at thelsw.org. We were all really excited about it, and then we hit a wall, or rather two walls: one was that none of us felt very comfortable with Drupal, and the other is, as you all know, that trying to design a website with a bunch of people — even a bunch of like-minded people — is an exercise in frustration.
Since then the site has languished, though on occasion someone adds something to it. People also still add things to the orginial LSW wiki on occasion, and drop in the LSW Meebo Room, although most of the action of late seems to be taking place in the FriendFeed room — and last I looked, the LSW group on LinkedIn was thriving, too.
The LSW is anarchic by both design and nature, and that’s as it should be, but when Josh brought up the Drupal site again yesterday on FriendFeed, I got an itch to do something about, and I’d like to invite you to help.
Right now, I am just working on wireframes — the information architecture and the general layout of the site. I figure we’ll worry about how to get Drupal to do all of this after we figure out what we want the site to do in the first place. Right now, the general idea seems to be that the site should both pull in LSW activity from other places (e.g., pull in an RSS feed of the FriendFeed room, etc.) and point out to those other places.
Inviting people to collaborate on a website design is asking for trouble, I know, but I’m going to do so anyway. I hope we can all agree that none of us will be completely happy with the site we come up with. We all have ideas about what good web design is, and while we probably agree on a lot of things, we all still have our own aesthetics, and we will all need to accept that there may be colors, fonts, and graphics that are Not Our Thing.
The discussion is mostly taking place on FriendFeed, but if you haven’t been by there, here are all the threads I can find on the subject:
Recent Discussions
- At some point, something needs to be done. . .
- Okay, kiddos. This is just a wireframe. . .
- I just made these as two possible headers. . .
Older Stuff
- Several Tangler forum discussions about the site
- My stab at an LSW site design. . . (ancient, and not really on the table anymore, but a good as an object lesson in the why we will never all agree department)
If you’re at all interested in helping out, please dive in! I suspect we’ll keep discussing things mostly in the FriendFeed room, but feel free to drop me a line at newrambler at gmail or catch me on IM (newrambler on gtalk; theblackmolly on AIM). Just be sure to bring patience, tolerance, and your sense of humor.