Forming a new test group

[Dave Winer]

Dear Radio-Dev'ers and Frontier-Users..

We're forming a new test group for a product we will release on March 11.

The product, which I have already written about on Scripting News is called
Radio Community Server. It will be a commercial product that makes it easy
for communities of Radio users to form outside UserLand.

We already have a few people testing the software, but we need a special
kind of tester for the product, people who can start and run a small
community of Radio 8 users.

Here are the requirements.

1. You must have a machine that's accessible with a fixed IP address, that's
visible to the users you want to support. That could mean that your machine
is a full peer if the community is on the public Internet; or that your
machine is accessible to people behind a firewall, for a private workgroup
within an organization.

2. You must have either Radio 8.x or Frontier 8.x on this machine with a
current subscription. (The new application runs in either Frontier or Radio.
The only difference is that Frontier supports comments, if you're using
Radio to host, no comments.)

3. You must have a community of willing users. At least three people,
preferable more. Assume there will be glitches, so the people must be
somewhat leading edge and tolerant of glitches. Note that the software is
reasonably well-tested since it is derived from the code that's already
supporting a community of several thousand users. But it's been reorganized,
so there probably will be problems.

4. You must have time over the next few days to ask us questions on the
private mail list, so we can build the FAQ page, write docs, fix bugs, add
callbacks, the usual stuff when we're in the endgame on a product ship.

5. The software is as easy to set up and administer as Radio itself is. The
same five-minute-install. An Events page (but flipped around, you see
upstreaming from the server's perspective). For the first group of community
leaders, we'd like to work with people who have already gotten Radio or
Frontier running, because (again) we're certain that there will be problems.

If you have the time and interest, please send an email to
lawrence at userland.com., and we'll let you know asap how we want to proceed.
Thanks very much for your interest, and with your help RCS will be a great
success.

Dave