Oscailt's Basic Design

Oscailt is a fully featured Collaborative Content Management System. It's goal is to assist groups of people organised democratically to communicate with the public and to provide platforms for public expression on the internet. It's ambition is to enable arbitrarily large sets of individuals to produce, compile, organise and distribute unlimited quantities of focused and targeted information between themselves and the public at large in a perfectly democratic, transparent, accountable and non-hierarchical fashion.

Although there are a plethora of content management facilities available, Oscailt is differentiated from most content management systems by the following basic design principles:

• Allowing anonymous contributions is our basic assumption
• Providing Public access to the records of all administrative actions is another assumption.
• Retaining no information about users and as little as possible about administrators is assumed.
• Oscailt is fully self-contained, none of it features depend on external processes.
• It is designed to handle high volumes on slim resources. It should work on the most basic commercial php hosting account
• It is designed to be usable and accessible to people with disabilities and people using any browser.
• Allowing management responsibilities to be divided into different groups with varying degrees of autonomy and arbitrary overlaps is the goal of the management system.
• Stability and security are very important goals. Oscailt sites should be maintainable by people with no knowledge of code and a minimal knowledge of html.

However, Oscailt is very flexible and can be configured to reflect virtually any organisational structure. But, these are the things that mark it out from the pack. If you want to facilitate public debate, democratic organisation and accountability, then you should think about using oscailt as your communication tool.

Many of these features are common to the various Indymedia Content Management System. Oscailt however, is also a general purpose content management system. It provides private areas, private documents, highly configurable and fine grained role based management and community based management security systems. It allows administrators to apply arbitrary restrictions to virtually any action, providing post-moderated comments in one area, pre-moderated comments in another and no comments elsewhere.

Oscailt Community Management

put stuff in here about community concept

-- ChekovFeeney - 01 Sep 2005