New User Guide

Beginnings

The group has some of its origins with the Flaming Lotus Girls and we still maintain very close ties to that group. They rock! We follow many of their tenets... radical inclusion, being in a "do-ocracy" (if you want something done, do it!), working together because we love what we're doing...

It is our goal to make every aspect of this project open-source.

In the spring of 2007, SWARM received a grant from Burning Man to create and present the work at Burning Man 2007. We don't see the project as ending there. What we're building is new, portable and (if I say so myself) exciting! We intend to present it at other places in the upcoming years.

What is this wiki?

You're looking at one of the places we get a lot of our work done. We use other tools as well (see below). So the site is arranged for people working on the project, not necessarily for visitors. Though in any case you are completely welcome to look around and maybe even join us! New users might want to get started with the Orb Handbook as some of the other wiki pages may be a little out of date.

If you want to edit the wiki, contact Lee (Lee at Lee dat org). He'll get you a login ASAP! An influx of spam forced us to lock-down the wiki. :-(

How we get stuff done

We get the majority of our work done in a couple ways, on a private mailing list, the wiki, Subversion, and in person.

• Mailing List

To get up to speed, you would do well to subscribe to the mailing list and read the archives. Currently anyone can subscribe to the list, however it might change to invite-only if spam becomes a problem.

• Wiki

The wiki is fairly self explanatory (I mean, you're reading this on the wiki, right?).

Private information (passwords, phone numbers, postal addresses, email addresses) isn't kept on the public wiki. For access to the private wiki, contact Lee (email:Lee at Lee dat org). If you are new to using a wiki for a work project, check out the help page.

• Subversion

Subversion is a computer software source code version control system. We store all of our code there.

• In Person

We usually meet weekly in San Francisco, usually at the Box Shop. Thursday seems to be the new meeting night, Check the email list for more information. And sub-groups start up all the time. Again, check the email list. You don't have to be in San Francisco to help out. Some of our members aren't in North America! Most fabrication and maintenance takes place at the Box Shop.

Getting up to speed

As we are constantly upgrading and improving the various systems, this wiki is almost guaranteed to be out of date. (Sorry! But if you care please help document things!) A good place for newcomers to get started is the Orb Handbook