Native Heart

I've been corresponding with Frank Odasz of Lone Eagles Consulting since I met him at last summer's Digital Pathways Conference and he's had some excellent ideas about using CMS to engage Native Americans. These same concepts translate well to my work with women's empowerment and economic development in rural areas of the Middle East.

Since then I've contacted Openia and they've provided a free Plone site for us. (Thanks, Openia. You guys rock!) We're just getting set up, but the plan is to leverage existing systems like YouTube, LinkedIn, Monster, and Flickr with Plone as the hub. Right now its a prototype running on the good wishes of Openia, but we're on the prowl for a sponsor who will cover the bill for a monthly .org domain and full-up Plone 3.0 site where we can add the products we need (for example, Plone4Artists) and have space for the multimedia content we hope to attract. Stay tuna'd...

Meanwhile, one of the critical needs for pushing Plone forward are low-cost and free hosting services. Also, a how-to would be extraordinarily helpful on setting up a personal server on a home computer using, say, a standard Comcast connection, some simple scripts to handle IP addressing issues, and services like no-ip.com.