Trevor and I didn’t end up choosing the Disseminary’s future CMS this afternoon, although my sense is that we’re leaning toward an Open Source application (in keeping with the “Open Source theology” premise of the project). Seabury will, I believe, stay with Movable Type, with which the community is already familiar — but that too hasn’t been finalized.
We spent much of our time trying to figure out how to vitalize the Disseminary’s presence. Trevor advocates adopting a “journal” metaphor for the project, reasoning that theologians aren’t typically hip enough to climate changes in media that they would be quick to respond to our initiative to participate actively in online publishing and interaction. A journal, though, they could understand and get involved with. This is OK with me, so long as we redouble the energy we put into eliciting contributions. We talked about posting interviews with well-known theologians, publishing reference summaries of important works in theology (such as might be useful for someone exploring topics, or reviewing for works already read), working on getting reviews going, and keeping after some of the plans we originally devised.
I had to break off the conversation after a while, since today was a physical therapy day. Today, my therapist gave me a soft splint (black Neoprene thingy) to alternate with my hard plastic splint. The hard splint has contributed to alleviating my tendinitis, so that’s not as urgent any more; the soft splint is supposed to help with my arthritis. It looks cooler; hey, it had a basketball player on the packaging (not a named player making an endorsement, but a generic player). I set up the oldest medical joke in history: “Say, will I be able to play basketball when I wear this thing?” She, however — lacking the vaudevillian timing that might ensure a promising future in comedy — merely indicated that I probably shouldn’t play basketball for a while. So, a change of splint and some more iontophoresis, and I was on my way.
The arthritis part was a bit disheartening, but Margaret made everything better by returning the library copy of Holy Cards, but returning with a copy of our very own. She’s a sweetie, no doubt about it. . . .
Posted by AKMA at May 26, 2004 11:36 PM | TrackBackYou should seriously consider Drupal for the Disseminary. The collaborative book module would work great for such a publishing model; I have two sample essays I published as book pages that you can look at (you're cited in one). With the collaborative book module, you get printer-friendly versions, which is nice for people who want to assign the work in their classes. Charlie Lowe is working on a Drupal distribution, in case you're interested; it's designed to be easier to install and configure.
By the way...I noticed that the Disseminary's CC license doesn't allow derivative works. I'm a little surprised at that. After the exciting derivative works from Lessig's Free Culture, I would have thought you'd be more open to allowing them. Would you mind saying a little bit about why you chose that license? I ask because I have talked to other academics who are quite resistant to the idea of allowing derivative works, and I don't understand the reservations, so I want to be able to wrap my mind around it.
Posted by: Clancy at May 28, 2004 09:59 AM