I thought it was probably about time I said hello and introduced myself to the readers of the blog. Hey there – I’m Matt Lee, newly appointed web monkey for freeculture.org – you might be wondering whatever happened to Abhay. Unfortunately he was in a car accident, but the good news is that he’s okay. Our thoughts are with him. Therefore, I have taken over the role of all things web.

So, here we are. I’m Matt Lee and I live in the UK. I am the founder of the CNUK Media Foundation – we’re doing some cool free culture stuff in the UK. Freeculture.org is an interesting project for me, not least because of the time difference and working with a group of highly energetic students on the other side of the globe always promises a few surprises in my inbox in the mornings. What I had inherited was a website with a lot of promise, and a lot of content, but no clear direction of where to take the site, and nobody seemed to be able to give it the love and attention it deserved – a pretty good start nevertheless.

What I’m planning, over the coming days, weeks and months is a migration period, which is where we’re at right now – the site and blog should be much quicker to respond, and the wiki is now in its rightful place. The next stage, is to refine the look and feel of all our web projects, so everything looks like it’s the same site, and none of it looks like an out of the box Mediawiki or Wordpress (they’re both fine looks, but they’re everywhere!)

The next phase, will bring content management and a new, more accessible design to freeculture.org – we’ll be using the Plone content management system. I’ve got a lot of experience with it, and it really is the best free software content management out there. In fact, Public Knowledge and the FSF are using it – we’re also using it for most of our projects at CNUK. With content management will come the ability for anyone authorised to update the website, without needing to know any HTML – a huge barrier to getting non-geeks involved – giving the web team more time to focus its efforts on all sorts of cool stuff.

Speaking of web teams, we could really use more volunteers – if you’re interested drop me an email – web@freeculture.org – and tell me what your experience with GNU/Linux, PHP, MySQL, Plone/Zope, Wordpress, Planet and Mediawiki is. Don’t worry if you’ve not heard of some of them – any serious offers gratefully received.

Oh, and we want your blogs. Send us your RSS feed URLs. We’ll love you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 at 7:16 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.