What Consumerium needs

For February 2004:

• A better front page - the present one is just not good, says nothing about the mission, is an ad for Wikipedia and Babelfish, and unless you know what a "wiki" is, you won't know where the real material is. Trolls could whip one up, but, maybe it's a good opportunity to ask a real designer in to do it... ?

Well the alternatives if the current page is bad are

A) Redirect to Main Page

B) To do a summary and soup it up with nice graphics

This would be good, not everyone edits wiki pages, and not everyone thinks mediawiki looks good.

• • For example, http://www.kband.com/ - run by The Cunctator, who might help if asked nicely.

• A specific call for help from programmers, designers, and researchers (three separate calls); For instance the call for programmers might ask for some experience assessing Python as a language for solutions, since MoinMoin is written in it, and is one of the wiki code alternatives, or for someone who knows tikiwiki inside out to assess its suitability for our purposes.

• • Maybe going on orkut or some of the other wiki-focused forums to look for them? There has been good outreach to mediawiki and some activity from that direction. Now reach out to the others - like metaweb, wikiwikiwiki, moinmoin and tikiwiki...

• A request for serious editors with some experience in Wiki Management and governance who have not actually turned the projects they have been involved in into enemy projects or done GodKing worship without question (almost the same thing, not quite). These should be people who put out reliable nonprofit information that is used for some life-altering purpose, like medical or health instructions - or at least are willing to treat Consumerium buying signal as "sacred" and not to be tampered with for "ad hominem" reasons. Some of the better Wikipedia editors like w:User:Mydogategodshat (business) and w:User:Jrincayc (economics) and w:User:Mirwin (governance) would be extremely valuable to have at Consumerium, since they may know how to avoid repeating Wikipedia's mistakes.

• • These people probably have to be approached individually.

• Some input from Adbusters and Greenpeace people and others working on essential projects - we want to connect to these before they get taken over by people with an incomplete understanding of the goals, and too much emphasis on technology or "the wiki way" (which is ideology, and mostly not realistic), and be guided by real people who do real nonprofit work in the real world, not a bunch of technocrats and real-world refugees who think they can tell truth from nonsense and that they can settle a political dispute by block IP.

• Some input from those working on political software projects (like useless and dangerous e-voting which every one who looks deeply into says is a bad idea) that might help them repurpose themselves onto real solutions like we are talking about here. There are many Python programmers presently talking about an "open source framework for electronic voting". This is a dumb plan, and a far better use of their time would be to come here and make everything work in a month, and extend MoinMoin to suck in all the GFDL text corpus so we can work with it without MySQL, perl, GodKings, or dreaded "Wikipedians". They may even beat Metaweb to the punch, and maybe get Metaweb working on OUR problems. Which would rule, since their team is led by Danny Hillis. Look that name up!