Dear iapct fellows following this thread.
A short update on what we’re working on.
Matias Salgado and I will be working on the iapct site over the course of this year.
The website iapct.org will over the course of this year transform into an up-to-date, responsive and pretty site that serves our many purposes.
Here’s an outline of what to expect:
The iapct.org site will serve as a frontpage for those browsing the web looking for Perceptual control theory, as well as a base for our iapct members.
The frontpage and the menu will give access to collections of posts, related to pct. The frontpage will unite and link to the current info of iapct.org as well as the relevant content of pctweb.org and probably some other sites too.
We’ll be using Wordpress, which allows us to build a rich database of pages (stable pages with information that does not age) and posts (news, articles on particular subjects sorted by date). In that way we can collect and unite the many vulnerable PCT sites on the web under a single site, preserving and providing valuable information deep into the future.
Domains within PCT, such as robotics or MOL, can have a unique landing page, for example iapct.org/theme/MOL with general information (a page) and a collection of posts tagged with MOL. These collections can grow organically over time.
Matias and I will build the site, but we have no aspirations to have a job curating the site or processing all the existing information. That means that the site must allow the involvement of multiple members who can curate and make posts and pages. That’s easy within wordpress, which is able to assign roles as administrator, editor or author.
People with a collection of articles on PCT on their current site, such as @Abbott or @Archivist might collect them at the iapct site under their own name, and tag them into the appropriate collections (e.g., BillPowers, Conference, LivingControlSystems).
We’re currently building the site prototype and will release it somewhere this year once we’re ready to go public.
So for those collectors of PCT materials willing to share them on the IAPCT site in the future:
Please wait a while before you act, we need to prepare first. We will provide you with information on how to add your own materials in the right way. Materials can be text documents (you could easily copy/paste materials into wordpress posts) but also PDF’s. Anticipate that you will be needing meta-information on each article, such as author, original publishing date, title. And pictures (landscape format) that fit the post are appreciated for a nice lay-out. There is no need to keep domain names alive for this purpose, as long as you keep access to the articles.
We’ve got a sketch of the above in this document. IAPCT website - Google Slides
Feel free to comment here or there.
Best,
Eva