DAVIS COMMUNITY NETWORK Information Providers Committee MEETING NOTES Regular Monthly Meeting, Wednesday, January 3, 2001 City of Davis Computer Lab, 600 A Street Attending: Alan Brattesani, John Chiles, Anne Hance (Chair), Steve McMahon Absent: John Batchelder, Ed Henn, Richard Yamagata, Wendy Yoder 1. 6:30 - Approved agenda 2. Business: No Project applications to consider 3. Committee members who have not already done so were asked to review projects, shell and nonprofit accounts whose reviews are due. Also to take a look at the updated Printed Matter site at http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/go/gizmo/ . The updated site retains its original, familiar character but now provides a clearer idea of what the site is about and what it contains. 4. Discussions: We discussed the support that DCN through the IPC gives to its sponsored and mini projects. • It was agreed that the Workshop on the philosophy and basic assumptions that need to be addressed before even starting to build a website was a very important one for IPC Project teams. Steve has done a two-hour workshop on this topic several times already. • The follow-up workshop needs to be an introductory overview of what is involved in designing and building a website (this is not an html or web design class though) and - all important - a practical "how to" introduction to the creation of web graphics. It was felt that most people can deal with learning how to put text onto a web page but the creation of suitable graphic images is a different matter. Steve agreed to talk to Richard Reid about helping with such a workshop. The committee then had a useful session, facilitated by Steve, continuing the discussions about the structure and content of the DCN Website. Two aspects of the site upgrading were considered: a) the tools and b) the information a) Steve explained about an open source tool called ZOPE which is already installed on the DCN server. DCN can deploy ZOPE to provide an 'Application Environment' in which the job of building and maintaining web pages can be systematized - even semi automated. We talked about customizing ZOPE's various capabilities so that not only would subscribers but even professional designers would be advantaged by certain easy-to-use aspects of the program. The customization of ZOPE would/will require skill and some considerable amount of time. Steve will do as much as he can in his available time. b) Meanwhile the committee members agreed to help with the information aspect of the project. Steve had brought a listing of the entities with a presence on DCN. i) Alan agreed to study the list of businesses and assign the individual entities to business sub categories; ii) John agreed to do a similar analysis of the list of Organizations. iii) Anne agreed to assign entities and cross references to the Living and Recreation Categories. 5. 7:50pm Adjourned ** NEXT MEETING - February 7, 2001 **