Prior to officially forming a working group, 10 technology principles were developed and agreed upon by NPC and LOC members.

Upon formation of our working group, after the first NPC face-to-face meeting in March 2009, Alfredo Lopez from May First/People Link in Brooklyn, NY was nominated to chair the group. We developed the following mission statement:

The Technology Working Group's purpose is to provide high level coordination, prioritizing, and decision making about the information and communications technology used in organizing the United States Social Forum in 2010. We welcome all members, regardless of technical skill or experience, to participate.

We recognize that technology development is not just one aspect or one part of organizing for the social forum, but is integrated into almost every working group, both nationally and locally. Our approach is work collaboratively with all other working groups on developing the technology they need, assign technically skilled volunteers to each of the working groups, and help coordinate the work of the tech volunteers through the forum.

We operate according to the technology principles agreed to at the March 2009 NPC meeting in Detroit.

During our first few months, we have:

  • developed a working group email list of 23 people
  • begin addressing and answering the 6 foundational questions posed by the NPC (as of July 2009 we have not finalized this document)
  • scheduled regular phone meetings (every two weeks on Thursdays at 5:00 pm America/New_York time, with 5 - 15 participants on each call)
  • Scheduled 6 work sessions
  • setup email list capabilities so that all social forum organizers can have group @ lists.ussf2010.org email lists
  • setup a tech project web site and ticket tracking system (http://ict.ussf2010.org/)
  • in collaboration with the local organizing committee, setup a general purpose wiki ( http://wiki.ussf2010.org/) for collaboration
  • in collaboration with the communications working group launched the initial web site ( http://www.ussf2010.org/)
  • in collaboration with the resources working group and the communications working group, created an online database which includes all the registrants from the 2007 Social Forum and is able to send mass email, accept and code online and offline donations, and many other common database functions.
  • use free and open source software for all social forum technology projects