About this site

https://www.neme.org/about/about-this-site

This site is NeMe’s first major, and longest ongoing project and has been on line since 27 February 2005. The code of the site’s design is licensed under a GNU General Public Licence  and it is distributed on github . The site provides valid RSS, and ATOM feeds out of the box, but it is also designed with valid HTML5, CSS3 and Lighthouse’s page speed optimisation standards for the best client experience.

Current editors of this website are Yiannis Colakides and Helene Black.

Considerations

Design

The design of this site does not follow trends but aims for functionality instead. As such the layout is essentially the same since 2005 , although its software, html structure, and styles are updated or debugged regularly. These updates included the conversion of the site into a responsive one to cater for visitors using mobile devices. We avoid using cutting edge html or css features as soon as they are released, but in the rare cases that we do, we provide CSS or javascript fallbacks for older browsers.

Standards

This website coheres to GDPR and the WAI of the W3C. Whenever possible it tries to meet the highest standards set by the W3C, and implemented numerous security measures to ensure the the protection of this website.

Our approach to web accessibility is to ensure there are no barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, our websites by people with disabilities and/or those with socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed and provide equal access to information and functionality.

Environmental impact of this website

The NeMe sites are not currently hosted in a green server but we nevertheless make efforts to make its environmental impact for the end user as small as possible. This has been a challenge, as the introduction and proliferation of mobile devices demand extra styling which means larger downloads.

Relating this with the average internet connection speeds , a shocking connectivity disparity amongst nations is revealed. For many internet users, not only are their speeds low but also, the software they are running might be old – especially as the new trend demands from computer owners to update from the net. In addition, there is the growing-problem of the disappearance of the middle-class and the widening gap between those with money and those without, those who can afford to update their hardware and those who can not. As such, for us, accessibility takes into consideration not only those who face physical challenges but also those who face infrastructural and/or financial ones.

Optimising the server requests

Optimising the server requests saves energy and this is easy as our CMS of choice occupies a very small digital footprint and its flexibility allows for maximum control with fewer server requests.

Optimising the images

As images take up most of the bandwidth and consume more energy when transferred, we opted to reduce their size and number appearing in each page, although we understand that this can be seen as problematic for a cultural organisation which by definition, is dedicated to the production and/or presentation of quality audio-visual content. Taking into consideration, both the connectivity disparity and the carbon footprint, we were faced with the challenge to reduce page size without making the website purely textual. Although we are fully aware that this method is negatively affecting the so called visual graphic impact of our pages, we nevertheless believe that sacrifices should be made in order to reduce carbon emissions and still hope that you will enjoy your visit here.

Delivery speed

Although the speeds of the delivery of our pages are dependent to your internet connection and the load on our server, we have implemented three methodologies in order to reduce the energy consumed via web-transfers.

  1. Our sites are served using the HTTP/2 protocol.
  2. Our pages code is minimised.
  3. Our pages are compressed using gzip before transfer.
  4. Our pages and media are cached which reduces server requests.

Security

NeMe has implemented numerous security  measures to ensure the most complete protection of this website and any data processed through it. However, Internet-based data transmissions may in principle have security vulnerabilities, so absolute protection is not guaranteed.

Copyright

The Blog section of this website is the only section which is licenced under a Creative Commons licence.

The copyright of the About section belongs to NeMe. Our publications have different licences, so do check those if you download our pdfs.

Texts copyright

All 116 texts in this site are published with the permission of the authors and copyright to those, belongs to them. As such no text published in this site may be translated, reproduced, republished, photographed or stored on microfilm, in electronic databases, video disks, etc., without first obtaining written permission from the authors. The views expressed in these texts do not necessarily reflect those of NeMe as an organisation or its members.

Projects copyright

The copyright of all 153 projects listed in this site belongs to NeMe and/or the named curator(s).

Content Disclaimer

Despite careful scrutiny, NeMe and the editors do not guarantee the correctness, relevance or completeness of the information published on this website. In the case of material or non-material damages resulting from the use of the offered information, absolutely no liability claims directed at NeMe and/or the editors are to be asserted. NeMe and the editors reserve the right to change the website in its entirety or in part without notice, or to stop publishing entirely. (Read our complete policy).

AI

After long considerations and discussions we decided not to block AI bots to our site and enhance its Agentic Browsing capabilities.

AI bots

It is a well known fact that AI is trained by the freely available content of the web, as well as other content which is fed into it. With the barrage of fake news, misinformation, and extremism, we decided that we should not block AIs as we would rather have them ‘learn’ from and quote our content as well.

Agentic browsing

Agentic browsing is an emerging web navigation model where AI-powered software agents autonomously execute tasks, fill forms, and complete multi-step workflows on the web on behalf of a user. Although we feel that this may compromise the security of our sites, we believe that the feature may be of help for those with disabilities.

AI-Assisted Browsing

AI-Assisted Browsing is a web navigation model where an AI assistant lives inside the browsers to analyse, summarise, and explain web content of the web pages. Although AI summaries leave nuances out, we also understand that time has become limited for may people as the 16 hour work days are becoming very real.

Colophon

NeMe sites which include www.neme.org, and a-sea-change.net , are authored using customised open source software. For both domains, we use the wonderfully versatile Textpattern  CMS.

Thanks

To the 49 people who helped us with the enhancements, coding and debugging our websites.