Hack-a-thon

Six intrepid Libertarians braved cold and snow to meet at the Artisians coffee shop in Columbia to recast our various websites into one on Saturday, February 7.

Led by Glenn Nielsen, the group included Hugh Emerson, developer of MOLP’s site on Geocities, Bob Sullentrup, the developer of the e-Show-Me-Freedom site and three collaborators of the Internet Initiative including John Schultz, John Dupuy, and Adam Shahid. Marty Ryan from Columbia also stopped by.

The purpose of the meeting was to gain traction in the efforts to implement the Internet Initiative. This included assessing the “look and feel” of the prototype which Glenn Nielsen developed and Lisa Emerson revised. The group agreed upon security policies and best practices, reviewed a broad based work plan, and began creating web pages with content.

Glenn proposed the group ‘start with a static site and then plug in additional features as time goes on’.

Envisioned features include:

• Secure means of site updates by multiple writers, county chairs and other authorized persons
• Simplified capture of visitor information
• Automatic processing of database information from the national LP
• Communications facilities to provide contact information for press releases and for county chairs or other authorized users to produce broadcasts
• Links to affiliated sites such as the Advocates for Self-Government, National Federation of Independent Business
• Links to collaboration sites such as Meetup.Com
• A common look and feel using page templates using cascading style sheets.

The site being developed is at http://dev.lpmo.org/, while the final production site's address will be  http:www.lpmo.org/. The new site for Show-Me Freedom will be at

http://www.showmefreedom.org/ . The development site for SMF is http://smf.lpmo.org/.

Bob Sullentrup reported Shane Corey, the national LP’s webmaster, at the State Chair’s meeting in Raleigh said effective websites should direct visitors to particular functions. “Figure out what it is you want your visitors to do – e.g., make a donation or leave contact information – and direct them there”. In addition, good sites frequently provide new content and “make it easy for visitors to make connections with one another”.

The effort also involves some infrastructural issues. Andy Finkenstadt, the owner of the LPMO.ORG “domain” (a group of resources available on the Internet via a common name) transferred ownership to the Missouri Libertarian Party effective Feb 1, 2004.  Andy had obtained, paid for and managed this domain over the years. Andy manages the server which hosts the http://www.stcharles.lpmo.org/ website containing pages for county committees in eastern Missouri, along with Show-Me Freedom.

The site will be used as soon as certain structural technical elements are in place. “We need to set up the server and migrate content from our other sites in about two weeks”, stated Glenn. State Chair Bob Sullentrup expects to begin posting Show-Me Freedom articles to that site by March. Ultimately Show-Me Freedom will be in its own web domain, but could easily share content with its MOLP site host.

“We want to have this operational by the convention so we can show people and enroll them in their utilization of it”, Glenn continued. Bob Sullentrup noted, “This initiative will facilitate a step change in our ability to get more mileage out of our individual efforts, to communicate with one another and extend the contributions of additional volunteers”.