Digital volunteering
====================
Long time no seen, huh? I've got a pretty good reason though.
Background.
Some six or seven yeard ago with a couple of other guys we've founded a local
not-for-profit organization called "Miskolc Cycling Association" (MCA for
short). It's not the sporty guys type of cycling, but the other one, the
commuter type. It is about providing advocacy, building a knowledge base for
local cyclists, running campaigns for safer roads etc.
Before moving to Kraków, Poland some two years ago, I was a secretary and a
board member for MCA but after my move, I obviously couldn't really participate
in the work of MCA as I was not there (here), I didn't see what is going on in
the city. Discussing everyday matters via emailing back and forth is not a
solution that works. Meeting up for a lunch, doing short phonecalls is, but
email was tiresome and time-consuming.
Anyway.
Since I moved back to Miskolc, Hungary, I more-or-less caught up with stuff and
decided to start volunteering for MCA again -- or, in this particular case,
"volunteering digitally".
Back in 2012 I created a website for MCA[1], built on WordPress, heavy as fuck,
also overkill from a lot of perspectives. But it served us good enough to not to
touch it and bother with it too much. In the last year, however, MCA started to
shift its focus from the "cycling in the city" stuff to a more general approach,
including liveable cities, vision zero principles and sustainable mobility.
Meanwhile it more and more became a professionals' association rather than a
community based one. As I quickly found out, the website became illogically
structured for this new approach -- for example the "news" section ate up most
of the space on the frontpage, yet fewer and fewer news were published. The real
content was built on sub- and sub-subpages in a form of a comprehensive
knowledge base. So a rather large part of the front page bacame "dead space",
while important stuff was hidden under several clicks, almost unnoticeably, if
you are not coming from a search engine.
So I decided to rewrite the whole website -- and while at it, I also decide to
move away from WordPress and migrate the whole stuff to a lighter and simpler
solution, namely to Kirby CMS[2]. That, of course, means I had to find a
solution to export WordPress entries to Kirby-compatible plain text files -- at
the end, (since there are 250+ posts, manual conversion is not an option) I
ended up with writing a script that pulls out WordPress posts via a
plugin-provided JSON API and structure them in order to fit Kirby's needs.
I am still in the very middle of the rewrite/redesign process -- most likely it
will take weeks before the new wersion of the site goes live.
Meanwhile I also started to publish articles for MCA. I've already written two
of them -- one about how city politics became dangerously car-centric and
another one about traffic jams caused by bad city design. And a third piece is
under preparation (this one will be about taking away pedestrian spaces in favor
of roads and parking spots), but I still need to prepare the illustrations
(modified satellite images from Google Maps) before publishing it.
All this eats up quite a lot of my time, so I don't have much time for my
regular (personal) blogging activities. I'm not complaining though, I think when
MCA's new website goes live, it'll be well worth it.
---
[0] hhtp://kerekparosmiskolc.net
[1]
https://getkirby.com
