So, what do you want from this?

[alexbayleaf]

I see we now have > 20 people involved here on DW, and 14 members on the (currently broken, ugh, stupid buggy hosting site) mailing list, so welcome to everyone! We have an intro thread in progress if you'd like to stop by and introduce yourself.

I wanted to take a moment to ask everyone what you would want from a site like this? I mean, I have an idea what I want, but I'm pretty sure I'm not everyone, so I'd love to hear all your ideas for what the site could do/be.

So here are some leading questions which you can answer in comments, or just ramble in a general way if you prefer?

What do you most want to be able to do on a site like this?
What's missing from other sites that you've looked at?
What would make you keep coming back/staying involved, rather than drifting away?
If this site just did one thing really well, what do you wish it was?

A name! And next steps.

[alexbayleaf]

I posted yesterday in a members-locked post looking for suggestions/ideas for a name for this site. One that I'd found that was available was growstuff.org, and after some discussion with shadowspar and thisone on IRC, I'm convinced it's the best name available, and that it has a lot going for it, so I've registered it.

Points in its favour:

* It's informal and friendly-sounding, and we can extend that into our other messaging. "Skud is growing stuff!" etc.
* It's general, and not specific to eg. organic, seed sharing, urban harvesting, etc., so it won't turn people away by thinking it's not for them
* It's easy to say and spell, which makes it easy to tell people about offline.
* It's not directly related to any other site -- there were suggestions of "harvestry" by analogy with "ravelry" but I don't think it's a good idea to tie ourselves that closely; inspiration is one thing but too-close imitation is perhaps not the best path.
* It doesn't have the religious connotations that "harvest" has for some people/in some contexts.

Points against:

* It's a bit boring, perhaps?
* We don't look like the cool kids, who leave out vowels and stuff
* ???

Anyway, I think I can deal with those negatives, and as I said, I've registered it! So now we need to actually get cracking on this thing.

Renaming this comm: does anyone have some spare DW points they can throw my way for a rename token? I need 150 points.

Hosting: We need some simple hosting to set up an initial website and the tools we need to get started. I'm going to be looking for green/carbon neutral Linux VPS hosting, preferably ones that run on renewable energy rather than using carbon credits. Anyone got any recommendations or preferences? AISO is one that showed up earlier in my search; does anyone know anything good/bad/indifferent of them?

Sysadmin tasks: Need one or more someones to step up to help us set up mailman (first priority), simple web hosting (just a static page for now I think), and eventually all our other stuff. Mailman's the biggie right now. Volunteers? japester?

Website: I'd like a simple placeholder webpage, something that looks nice and just says what we're doing and where to find us (links to this comm, to our mailing list, etc.) Anyone interested in putting something together? aquaprofunda?

ETA: Github: need to set up an "organization" on github, which needs an organizational contact address, and therefore is dependent on having hosting/email set up. Just a note to do that once we have those things, I guess.

Hmmm, what else? I think that's all for right now.

IRC channel

[alexbayleaf]

Sorry for the spamminess!

I've set up an IRC channel for those who wish to chat about this project. It is #growstuff on Freenode (irc.freenode.net).

For those who aren't familiar, IRC is a real-time chat facility, and Freenode is a service offered to free/open source projects who want a chatroom for their people to share ideas etc.

Anyone can connect to IRC using IRC client software (various options are available for all OSes) or by using a http://webchat.freenode.net/ ... all you have to do is choose a nickname (your Dreamwidth name would be a good first choice) and connect to the #growstuff channel.

Hope to see many of you there!