Olansa Cuttings

Members of the beloved Baren Forum, and its council, have been debating how we should keep up (or catch up) with the times. You won’t be surprised that social networking brushed aside the other suggestions like an opera diva with a following wind.

Mike Lyons recently created the ‘Friends of the Baren Forum’ page on Facebook, which boasted over 100 members at last count. If you are a Facebook user and even slightly interested in printmaking, look it up.

A few of us have also built a dedicated Baren Forum social site, using the ever-expanding Elgg platform. You can find it at http://www.barenforum.org/barensocial.

Why roll our own? A number of Bareners don’t use, or just don’t get, Facebook. Whether or not we agree with them, it’s their choice to make. More importantly, Baren Social allows us to build a space around the interests of printmakers.

No ‘you might be interested in’ ads. No messages from sponsors. No attempts to make a buck from the user’s content. No sharing content or feeds with external sites unless the user explicitly allows it.

That’s a long list of negatives. Turn the coin over and you have: customisable discussion groups, private chat, personal blogs (public or private, to taste), an events calendar, and the ability to add any function we want from a growing list of Elgg extensions.

So far this has only cost the evenings of a few volunteers. I installed and tested the software. Julio Rodriguez took it from there and added much of what you see on the site, cleaned it all up and announced the live site last week. What happens next is up to the users. We hope that Baren Social and the Facebook page will become long-standing assets to the Baren Forum community: places to share visual content, how-tos, videos, and get to know their fellow Bareners a little better. Time will tell.

See you there?