George and I have been spending a great deal of time configuring this site and trying to 'bring it live' for some time now. We are building this site with an open source content management system called Drupal. I have personally been involved in the community and assessing and using the software for personal sites for 6 years. However this is both George and I's first greater experience using the software but we recognize it's vast potential. As we dove deeper into it's architecture and added features over the last year, we have been running into complexity issues in both our administrative organization and technical organization with managing the code. So we have decided it was time to step back, breathe, and take another approach. In a phone conversation last week, we decided that what we needed to do first is communicate with everyone, the alumni, first by turning this site into a simple blog. In the coming months, the site's look and feel will change and we will be rolling out different features, some that we have ready and waiting, and some that will be dreamed up and implemented by all of us, the Arcosanti Alumni Network.
George will be taking the lead on this blog for a few weeks with the explanation and roll-out of the Alumni account profile system. This system will allow you to expose as much or as little of your information as you'd like. We would really appreciate to at least publish your name, workshop year, and allow people to contact you(while keeping your email address confidential). At most, we would like to develop a dashboard of sorts that gives you a lot of control over the site, ie. create and join groups, search alumni, create a blog and upload pictures(if you don't have one already, in which case you can add the feed to our aggregator, please contact me). We see the beauty in the web as empowering a like minded group to act together and share administrative tools.
We are aware that there are a large handful of sites on the web that Alumni and Arcology enthusiasts gather to share information. And we are excited to join the ranks and add our unique vision of what we can do to achieve our common goals with open source communications tools, such as Drupal. Please share your thoughts with us in the comments and forums for now, and check back often(or set up your RSS reader) for updates and information about creating your profile. And if you or someone you know use Drupal and want to help builing the site, please contact George or Tim.