Flight Paths

Kate's writing space

We’ve been working on ‘Flight Paths’ for around five months now, and a lot of that time has been taken up trying to figure out how to make it work. Despite massive advances and changes on the web over the past few years, it still remains fairly complicated to create an open access site that can include multimedia.

The first version of ‘Flight Paths’ went up in a wordpress blog - this wordpress blog, in fact - with the add-on of commentpress, the widget created by the Institute of the Future of the Book that allows us to foreground comments on the right-hand side of the page, instead of buried beneath each post. While this seemed like a good idea at the time, this widget was actually created for people to comment on works that were already written; commentpress works best when you’ve got a draft of a text that you want to allow people to comment on paragraph by paragraph.

At the same time as working on this, Chris and I have been busy in the background making links with other organisations, collecting submissions from interested people, creating our own submissions, visiting the supermarket in Richmond to make recordings and take photos and videos, interviewing the journalists behind the original project, etc etc.

After a few months, it began to become clear to us that the wordpress blog wasn’t really the right venue for this project - a blog is a blog, even with the fab commentpress widget - and what we are trying to do is not create a blog. Neither of us are natural-born bloggers, and this project isn’t about writing a blog. Around this time, Netvibes, a homepage application that we had both been using, launched Netvibes Universes, and this seemed like the ideal platform to move ‘Flight Paths’ to - we’d always wanted to be able to curate the web for this project, to be able to collect things from all over the web, as well as collecting submissions, for the project. The Universe does in fact work well as a curatorial platform, although, inevitably, we’ve had mails from some of our contributors saying they can’t get the boxes to open.

However, quite apart from whether or not the Universe works across various browsers and operating systems, another issue for us is where to house the discussions that arise out of the submissions and from the various issues behind the project. With the commentpress widget the blog was almost okay for discussions, though we have never used the blog as a blog and have always manipulated the posts, trying to keep them to an orderly mininum in order to stop posts from being buried in the blog archive. This was quite labour intensive, and also counter-intuitive - again, trying to make a blog resemble something that isn’t a blog - so recently we’ve decided that, for discussions, we should use a forum. We’ve put a forum up in the ‘Flight Paths’ universe, and are currently pondering how best to use the forum.

All of this has been slow and time-consuming; I’ve found I’ve needed ages to ponder it all and get my head round how best to make this project work online.

For me, another of the issues is where to write into the project. To date, we’ve had wonderful story submissions to the project and these work well in the boxes on the story page of ‘Flight Paths’. But I’m interested in carving out spaces for myself and others to develop longer texts and stories. I’ve thought about a wiki but that’s not quite right. The blog doesn’t work for reasons already stated, though, interestingly, I find myself writing this into the blog today. The forum? The forum is a possibility… But forums are so… forumy. Does anyone have any suggestions? Any ideas?

Kate