Project Sharing Engine update – one week to alpha release
By Ed Mitchell 15th October 2012
We think that we are one week away from releasing the ‘alpha’ version of the Project Sharing Engine widget. It all begins on Monday 22nd October.
That’s right – we’ll be asking the ‘alpha webmasters’ (that’s you if you’re an alpha webmaster) to:
- Log in to the Transition Network site
- Configure a simple widget for your site
- Put a small bit of code into a widget on your own site
- Encourage your TI mates and website visitors to view projects via the widget, and add some of their own projects themselves
- If our timing is right, we hope you wouldn’t mind putting this into your newsletter (most are beginning of the month)
- Stay alert to see if anyone does add a project, and ‘moderate’ it (this will not be arduous) if they do
- Keep some notes about how it was to set up, install and use
Estimated dates and activities:
- Monday 22nd October: Alpha PSE widget release
- Late October – Late November: One month testing on TI sites
- Late November/early December: Alpha webmasters group feedback meet up in London
- December: Technical work to make the beta
- Early 2013: Quiet release of the beta widget
Here’s a screengrab of the ‘Get the Project Sharing widget’ screen:
Screengrab of Project Sharing Engine ‘widget installation’ screen for webmasters
Despite being easy to use and simple to look at, it is a complicated product and we have been working very hard behind the scenes to get it working as a sustainable product in the long term. This has involved work far deeper and odder than we thought, but we think we’ve cracked some big questions about ‘deliver-ability’ earlier on in the technical work than planned.
Here’s a screengrab of the ‘Add a project through the widget’ screen:
Screengrab of ‘project addition’ widget which will appear on TIs’ own sites
We don’t know what will happen, or what the effect of the widget will be; we are genuinely in unknown territory.
We hope that it will accelerate and widen the addition of projects to the directory (Transition and not Transition projects), but can’t make estimates of numbers.
As far as we know, no other organisation has tried to distribute their information or challenge the traditionally centralised power of a organisational website in this way.
As well as the technical side of the PSE project, this is about how to build a group of Transition webmasters through this project, and what is the best way for TI webmasters to support eachother across the web and build self-managed networks.