ICT Report to National Planning Committee May 2010

Since the OC meeting 6 weeks ago, the Information, Communications and Technology working group has been working hard to both support the infrastructure we've built and experiment with and extend our capacity to ensure the Social Forum is accessible to everyone, not just those able to attend in person.

Below is a report of our activities and our plans for extending access to the forum to people throughout the United States and world-wide.

Report Since OC meeting in April

Summary

Since our last OC meeting, the ICT (particularly members Ross, Mark, Joseph, Mallory, Jamie, and Alfredo) have:

• Worked closely with the registration team to make minor tweaks and improvements to the registration process, including the ability for organizations to edit their own registration records, pay to add more registrants, change their registrants.

• Worked closely with the Program and Culture working group to tweak and improve the system we developed to review workshop submissions, handle the flood of last minute submissions, developed system for importing the workshop schedule.

• Fielded hundreds of support requests around registration and workshop submissions

• Installed a new server and moved sites to the new server to handle the dramatically increased load. Based on flood during both workshop submission deadlines, we've tweaked our systems to handle the loads we expect for the forum.

• Developed the capacity for live video streaming - enabling the Social Forum to make significant parts of the forum accessible to people with the resources or abilities to attend the forum in person.

In numbers

Since the end of April the ICT has:

• Fielded 723 support emails from 362 people (Mark gets the award for personally handling 173 responses).

• 215 code changes to the primary three web sites to add new functionality and fix bugs (Jamie's takes the lead with 90 commits)

• Made 616 comments to tickets posted to our ticket tracking system, including the closure of a full 76 tickets (Mallory, with 345 posts is hands down the leader here).

Plans: next 4 weeks

Our primary three goals for the final push are: access, organizing and support.

Access

No matter how many people arrive in person, there will be many more who want to come but are unable to make it because they can't afford to, can't get time away from their jobs or families, are unable for to attend due to a disability, or can't get a VISA. The ICT will make one of our highest priorities ensuring that the forum is accessible to everyone by supporting the following Detroit Expanded initiatives:

• Live video streams: schedule 6 hours per day of live video streams. We will need help from outreach and communications working groups to facilitate both the publicity and organization of the schedule and events.

• Live audio streams: enable any US Social Forum participant with access to a microphone and laptop to create a live audio stream of their workshop.

• Video archive: organize the upload, indexing and retrieval all video taped portions of the forum.

• One-on-one Interaction: make a half dozen computers, with video, audio and headphones, available during the conferece for video Internet-based conferencing with anyone not at the conference.

Organizing

The Forum itself is only one part of the reason we are working so hard. The main goal is to facilitate organizing amongst the participants and the broader global left. Toward that end, we will be focusing on a number of features to help horizontal communication to happen via our web sites:

• Enable registrants to sign up for workshops in advance of the forum providing organizers with a better ability to plan and the ability to follow up after the forum.

• Allow users to self select interest areas, and opt in or out of communication from other participants on those topics.

• Provide a search interface for participants to find other participants in their geographic regions.

• SMS/Text messaging: allow users to sign up for SMS alerts, including, for example, the ability to recieve notifications of Forum events.

Support

To keep things functioning smoothly, the ICT plans to field a team to provide full, dawn to midnight tech coverage. In particularly we plan to provide special support to:

• Registration

• People's Media Center