I really enjoyed the process of creating (and facilitating the creation of) the Sea to Sky Freenet page. Working with a community organization, especially one with technology as their focus, crystallized a lot of interesting questions about the relationship between people and tech. And since many of the people involved with the freenet are also artsy types, we’re also starting to deal with some of the interplay between technology and art.

I’m planning to write up some of my thoughts from the process, particularly with regards to the organicness of web page creation and maintenance for non-profits. This post is mostly just a reminder to me to do that.

I also wanted to mention a couple of things. Maya Charnell over at the Squamish Volunteer Society is in the closing stretches of taking the old Community Resource Directory and translating it into a database structure that can be front-ended with some of the latest and greatest open source web interfaces. The outcome is going to a wonderful thing – a collection of all of the helpful places and people around the community – health units, government departments, art societies, whatever – that will intergrate itself into a commuity calendar that will integrate itself into a volunteer registry that will integrate itself into ad infinitum. She’s done a lot of work on this, especially lately since the whole idea is the thing will be freely available for republishing by anybody and the newspaper is going to do the first such publication next week. I’ve got a lot of respect for someone who has both the technical skills and the worldly thoughtfullness to put those skills to work so intelligently and the diligence to actually do it and get it done.

The other thing is that one the plone.org homepage (plone is an open source content managment system, though not the one we use) there is a link to this project: Plone4Artists, a working group to make a custom plone version to include all the tools that a community artist’s portal site might want. Another example of people who should be total geeks doing things not with geeky intentions in mind, but with geeky skills backing them up. If we can be people who learn crafts, and enjoy those crafts, but don’t lose ourselves so deeply in those crafts that we fail to see how they can best be applied to the world around us, then I think we can be good people.