NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary Mort]

The specific usage scenario I envision is to allow schools that follow
similiar philosophies[basically following an open source model to organizing
and running the school, where students are part of the process not passive
receivers of the process.  Two example of this would be the Brooklyn Free
School, http://www.brooklynfreeschool.org/ and my childrens school, the
Hudson Valley Sudbury School, http://www.hudsonvalleyschool.org/] to share
information and discuss issues at both the student level and at the staff
and assembly level.

However, just like in the open source movement there are license
fanatics[some GPL folks don't think the BSD folks are "pure" enough, and
there are BSD folks who don't think GPL folks are "free" enough], in these
schooling communities there are conflicts between schools on "purity" and
"outlook" of philosophy.

So while the option for each school to have their own forum is powerful, and
being able to share discussion about shared interest is very important, at
the same time each school needs to have the right to choose not to
associate/discuss issues in a public manner with other schools when and
where there are personality conflicts.

I am sure there are other communities like this that may appreciate the
ability to bother interact and have the choice to not interact.  LGBT
community centers, Animal Sanctuaries, etc.

So my first look into this is to see if there is anything close to this sort
of functionality out there in forums.  The closes I see at the moment is
FUDforum's ability to sync via NNTP or email list - but then your back to
having a central repository to sync to[the list or newsgroup] where really
the sites need to have a more personal and dynamic method of establishing
connections.

A few steps further would be how to handle mod deletions of posts on the
source forum when syncing, groups that may wish to also have their own
deletion control over external posts internally[and deciding to trust other
groups deletion choices as well], and how to handle the inevitable snit fit
when two groups fall out and decide to ban each other - do past posts get
yanked or left.  That sort of thing.
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