Hiya,
I know, I know, it's election time, everybody is campaigning, and probably no one is interested in this subject any longer 
Yesterday, while discussing a bit about the next RA term, the discussion around LA popped up again, as expected, and I remembered that in the ancient past we had some lovely websites from the New Guild showing the original planning of LA and the careful financial calculations regarding its parcels and such.
Going back, I listed all the "old" websites that we still have around. Because they're basically hosted for free, I never shut them down, perhaps also with the misguided hope that someone, one day, might pick up where they were left.
The original website is still around, I got a copy, although I have no license to display it It can be found on http://neufreistadt.info/www.neualtenburg.org/ (yes, odd URL, it's not supposed to be easy to find). This served us from 2004-2006. It's hand-coded HTML, so there are some bad links, although it's conceivably easy to fix.
Second in the list of the Ancient History of the CDS, we have http://neufreistadt.info/, which used to be our main website from 2006-2008. It's only maintained for historical reasons, since, with the latest software upgrades, the ancient CMS that drives this website doesn't work any more. But the content is not lost — it still renders the homepage, and all data is safe in the database!
Then we have the old land registration facility: http://land.neufreistadt.info/ It also doesn't work, but I don't know why (because it should!)
Hand-coded HTML, as well as ancient CMS, were quickly going out of fashion, so some entrepreneuring citizens set up a first WordPress installation back in 2006, when Colonia Nova was first built: http://colonianova.wordpress.com/ I have no idea who still has an account to that!
Around 2008, a lot of new web projects came into existence. While discussions continued around the "main" CDS website, separate from the forums, the New Guild needed some place to make public announcements and add attachments (the forum software, back then, was not very good in handling attachments), as not only the Masterplan was being discussed, but Locus Amoenus was planned as well. So the following sites were created, all done in WordPress:
http://newguild.slcds.info/ (General announcements about the New Guild, internal rules, etc.)
http://masterplan.slcds.info/ (General masterplan for all future sims of the CDS)
http://locus-amoenus.slcds.info/ (Projecting and developing Locus Amoenus)
Right now, only Moon Adamant (besides myself as an administrator) has access to those sites. Feel free to request logins, if you wish to update any of those sites.
The New Guild also needed a tool to manage the teams, so that deadlines cold be kept, work assigned, and so forth. Basecamp was considered costly, so an open-source alternative was created with Project Pier: http://projects.slcds.info/ This was actually used until 2011; Rosie even finished a few tasks as late as 2012. Après celá, le deluge — meaning mostly that the citizens lost a clear view of what was being done by the New Guild, what projects were under way, how much time was spent on tasks, and so forth.
In 2009, a plan was made to create a new Wiki for the CDS, which any citizen could update. While a placeholder was put in place, it was never installed (due to lack of interest). The old wiki was hosted and maintained by Aliasi Stonebender, and it had some precious transcripts from the earliest RA meetings, but, right now, as far as I can see, the old wiki is down. And the new one is empty
We also tried to set up an online social tool to keep in touch, but, thanks to Facebook, this never took off. In fact, it was massively attacked by spammers so I had to put it down.
By then it was also clear that it was impossible to keep track of the Code of Laws, so an attempt was made to create a website just for that: http://laws.slcds.info — which, as you can see, is completely empty.
In the mean time the new portal was up and running, rendering the above attempt useless. It should have been deleted but I'm lazy
Finally, in 2011, a few eager citizens suggested that we started a new webzine, "News of the CDS". This would be a collaborative blog, where a staff would pick the major news about the CDS, and keep them updated. The idea was to have a companion site to the portal — the portal would feature largely "static" content, and institutional information, while the webzine would deal with the exciting new things happening in the CDS. The idea was that since the forums are closed to unregistered users, most potential citizens can only see the portal, but not more than that. So a webzine with news and constant updates would be an alternative to show off our vibrant community.
This webzine is at http://news.slcds.info and never passed the 'testing' phase. It still features a lot of admins, who have full control over it:
annatoussaint
arriaperreault
mizouvavoom
moonriseazalee
rosiegray
torkarlsvalt
treborwarcliffe
(and yours truly, as you can see from the latest posts — aye, I was testing it out today just to see if it was still operational!)
Finally, in 2013, I was tired of maintaining so many different websites, specially because "abandoned" websites tend to be hacked and attacked by spammers, which, in turn, requires even more maintaining. So I pretty much moved all the above WordPress blogs into a WordPress multisite installation — so, a single login/password pair will get you access to all sites, if you have permissions to them — and started to harden its security, dealing with automatic backups and upgrades, and so forth. It's so much easier to have it all on a single central location Basically the only WordPress installation which is not under the "umbrella" installation is http://slcds.info, since that's maintained separately.
So why I'm mentioning this today? (I actually tend to post an article about the CDS' websites every other year or so )
Firstly, because there have been a lot of issues around Locus Amoenus, and I think it would be instructive for others to see how it was originally planned. Back then, this was the kind of detail that was expected for any large-scale public work in the CDS. And, as you can see, the plans were open for discussion and comment by everybody. How the times change
Secondly, because there has also been some comments about "inefficiency" in the planning and management of the new building to be done. While we rely mostly on the talent of volunteers, that's no excuse for bad management. If you wish, I can get you a login to the project management tool, and you can see that, in the past, we had professional management of the public works. Here is an idea on how it looked like:
- Milestones for Governmental Spaces Re-Organization Workgroup
And thirdly, because, well, there are indeed a lot of websites related to the CDS, of which few people are aware. Some are definitely open for participation — for example, it still makes sense that the New Guild, outside the forums, makes announcements and presents approved plans, transcripts of meetings, etc. on a separate site. Others might be just valuable for historical purposes. And others (like the "Law Portal" or the broken links to a non-existent wiki) are probably better to be shut down.
You decide
