Online Magazine for Schools [Mading Online]

Ryan Koesuma — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 07:16:48 +0000

school-press.com

Here in Indonesia, the highschool’s magazine / press clubs aren’t as extravagant compared to those in the US schools (or in the TV precisely); there are no Veronica Mars or Chloe Sullivan. Probably because of the smaller student amount of a school or their budget on journalism activities. I’ve been in one back in the days. However, the most common press / journalism culture for schools in the nation are wall-posted writings, or Mading (Wall Magazine). But for most, it doesn’t goes anywhere far from it.

So, a couple of months ago, in the moment of a new momentum, we (Bandung Blog Village) are discussing on what events should we organize. The common notion is, we should held a blogging competition. But we had to admit, it is becoming a mediocre, every institution, every month of the year seems to do the same, with little difference. In fact some of us had already won. So we decided to make the most of our skills and with a tight budget availability, without being average.

The comittee of Wordcamp Indonesia then approaches us with interests to do an event in Bandung related to the Wordcamp in Jakarta. We were all very excited at the idea, since most of us are avid Wordpress users and developers. Rather than just the usual blogging competition, we wanted the competition to utilize the magazine-style theme / layout that has grown prominence to be a trend lately (which I did with Deathrockstar.info since 2005). It is also always a good chance to showcase the CMS potentials of the Wordpress platform. And since we are aimed to educate and develop skills, we choose highschool students as our participants.

Climate Change Centre ITB and detikBandung are also interested in helping us out, so we have people from dealing environment issues / themes and online journalism. So we set a series of events, from workshops to tutoring sessions to support the competition. Unfortunately I was away when we decided the name, Bandung Blog Vaganza (in self-reference), but I was there when we chose the domain name, school-press.com (in reference to WordPress). To the full extent, we also choose to use WordPress MU as the platform for the multiple blogs (10 schools) rather than a self-hosted WordPress, and layout customisations are made by CSS.

While we’re then choosing on a magazine-style base theme to use, someone mentions Arthemia, in which we found out that the theme author, Michael J. Hutagalung, was a Chemical Engineering student in ITB, and it was an instant decision. We wouldn’t love more than to use the local products. Furthermore, he actually made a premium version which were user-friendlier at the admin side. I then tried to contact him and asked if he would allow to use the premium version for the students, and he generously did.

The winners were announced today, I happened to be one of the jurors, and the results were amazing. And to think we didn’t actually done much, they were already novice, if not experts. I think we should do this again this year, with broader scopes in Western Java such as Sukabumi, Cimahi and Garut, and also Jakarta (I was hoping that the our sister-community, TukangLenong would be interested in helping out). Moreover, we now know that if this was an easy thing for highschools students, why don’t go for junior highschools and do the blogging competition with elementary students. I always wondered what would the future generations would produce.

So here are the winners:

SMAN 20 Bandung
SMAN 20 BDG
SMK Informatika Bandung
SMK Informatika BDG
SMKN 4 Bandung
SMKN 4 BDG

I hope the thing with the WordCamp Indonesia committee goes smoothly and we could send these kids to Jakarta and present their achievements in front of hundreds of Indonesian WordPress users and developers and it’s founder (Matt Mullenweg). We are just functioning as an enabler, and we’re hoping that they would continue using their blogs, and there are some ideas of opening the school-press.com domain for other schools to sign-up.

Related media coverage:

Experimenting Social Networking Website for the local Creative Community

Ryan Koesuma — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 06:16:13 +0000

theopenlabs.com

The last couple of days, I’ve been toying around with Buddypress, the open source social networking plugin for WordPress MU. I’ve been planning for this to happen for a long time, ever since they released the WordPress MU (the code they used with Wordpress.com) to the public, and after a while Andy Peatling made ChickSpeak, a costumised WPMU installation with social networking. I’d knew sooner or later, there will be some plugins surfacing, and hence Buddypress. And I’d always wanted to implemented it to the local/indie music community with Deathrockstar.info.

However, I realized that for a site with heavy visitors like DRS, running WPMU behind it with a cheap hosting (if you decide to use them as well, enter MURAHAN as the promo code and you’ll get 1 free domain and 70$ discount) wouldn’t be as smooth. There’ll be a lot pressure because of the CPU time used on a shared hosting. And at the time Buddypress were still at its infancy. So I held back, and still (for DRS, at least).

Ideas arised when Emil, the chairman of BCCF, asked me if I would be interested to make a social networking site for the CEN’s project. At Helarfest 08, Raw Nerve offered to use their upcoming white label Creative Networking Platform to be implemented. However, up until now I haven’t got any updates on the project, but after looking at the test site, I’d definitely love to try it out.

Meanwhile Buddypress is out, and it started to feel a little tingly. After another successful implementation of WPMU on another project, I couldn’t have enough. This is it, the next logical step. I need a study case community, one with a very receptive talent pool for technology and social networking habits, my generation, the digital native. Moreover, I’ve been heavily involved with the community from the preconception and hangout with them intensively at Common Room. So, a couple of sleepless dawns, here it is.

My intention is purely experimental, so there’s no plan what so ever, just have a little fun, get bored and move on to the next interesting thing. There’s no ambitious agenda, folks! Be gentle to the server, okay?

Anyway, what I hope for the next is, this thing could spread out the other local communities and cities in Indonesia. To gain optimum advantage from this tool for their own networking. I’m just an early-jumper.

RyanKoesuma.com » Community Development

Online Magazine for Schools [Mading Online]

Experimenting Social Networking Website for the local Creative Community