Envisioning an RSS-based distributed network
RSS offers the obvious means of sharing and aggregating information across the sites in this network. Because telecentre end users are often accessing the Internet with low-bandwidth or intermittent connectivity, and RSS-based strategy also offers options for getting content easily and storing it locally for later reading. By tagging (assigning keywords to) as much of the sites’ content as possible, it will be easy to organize content across sites and even across multiple languages. The implementation of RSS and tagging was thus central to our review of software options.
Our search for the optimal web platform for the telecentre.org support-network-in-a-box (SNIAB) focused on options that might combine content management features (like the ability to easily create and edit web pages, register users, and automatically create navigation structures) with community and collaboration features (like RSS, blogging and wikis). We initially expected to choose a separate (though compatible) platform for the event-in-a-box (EIAB), with some overlapping functionality. As our vision for both SNIAB and EIAB grew more nuanced and concrete, we concluded that there would be significant advantages to selecting the same platform for both purposes. The primary advantage would be the ease of incorporating event-driven content into the flow of content among telecentre network sites; a secondary consideration was that it would be easier for telecentre partners to become familiar with a single tool, rather than two.
We gathered preliminary candidates by reviewing the tools used to create sites with community features, reading online discussions of CMS tools for the non-profit sector, and soliciting suggestions from colleagues. We wanted to find a tool that wasn’t just a CMS with a bunch of blog-like features attached to it; we wanted a tool that was fundamentally suited to a distributed network in which content would be continuously exchanged among sites. We also wanted to ensure that sites that were not built on the core platform would still be able to access content from the sites that were; we recognized that RSS was the only standard that could serve this purpose.