reCycld

reCycld is a self-consciously Web 2.0 working name for what will become a community-oriented portal dedicated to facilitating the crafting of recycled materials.

Rationale
Any reuse/repurposing/recycling (RRR) of materials keeps them out of landfills and limits the loss of the value and value-added attributes of the materials. Helping to do this by recognizing and encouraging crafters who use reused/repurposed /recycled materials is reCycld's most obvious purpose. In addition, we hope the portal will have the following possibly more significant consequences:

• Underscoring and the practicability of RRR in general.
• Underscoring the value left in RRR materials.
• Promoting cottage industries for trading in crafted RRR products and raw materials.
• Inspiring larger industries to use RRR materials.

Description
The intent is for reCycled to be a self-maintaining, community-driven resource. To that end, we have chosen to focus on what we are calling a “social blogging” interaction paradigm—essentially a hybrid of blogging and social networking. The vision for the site is a home base that chronicles developments relevant to the site's interests from the world-at-large and from community contributions, coupled with sub-sites that individual members will use to feature their own work and develop social and/or commercial connections.

Membership will be open to the public; however, site administrators will be authorized to deal with accounts that engage in abuse of the site's resources.

Development
Ideally, design decisions would dictate the technological infrastructure for a project like this. But it's important that this project be implemented in a short ten-week time frame and that it be entirely community supportable—especially after the original developers have left the project. These requirements all but rule out custom-coded portal infrastructures and suggest the most workable solution is to adopt a mature and community-supported CMS framework.

After evaluating available options, we have chosen to base development on a WordPress-MU core. WordPress and WordPress-MU are widely supported and very usable blogging solutions. To adopt the WordPress-MU core to our purposes (the addition of "social" functions, etc.), a variety of off-the-shelf extensions have been added and in some cases considerably modified.

User analysis, activity analysis and interaction models for the site are essentially complete at this point. From the home page, connections are provided to individual member contributions via editor-posted feature articles, automated listings of new contributions, and automated listings new memberships. Members are able to create a social experience by listing and linking to “friends” from within the system on their sub-sites. Planned for the future but probably not implementable within the target time frame is an e-commerce functionality that would allow community members to directly market their crafted goods or supplies.

A private alpha version of the site is available on the Web; in the upcoming weeks we will be working on branding issues and refining the interaction. We expect to be out of private beta in mid-January.

A major challenge for this project will be finding an appropriate permanent host. The host must be willing to offer large and scalable storage—on the order of 1 GB per 100 members—and be able to provide full domain hosting, a complete AMP stack, and SMTP services. If you are interested in volunteering hosting services, please let us know in the comments!