OpenPika ~ R.I.P.

A brief notice and a moment of remembrance for OpenPika.org.

Today we shut down the OpenPika server. URIs targeted at any of the multiple OpenPika domains henceforth will be redirected to the Webdogs 2.0 site. OpenPika was one of Legal Services of Northern California‘s earlier blog sites, back in the day (OK, only four years ago) when we started experimenting with various blog publishing platforms like Blogger and Movable Type, and eventually settling on WordPress as the open source publishing platform of choice. The OpenPika web road show ran for 22 months, from August 2004 to May 2006, as a long-form experiment in using a public web presence to provide both information and transparency to our staff and the larger legal services community about LSNC’s work in preparing for a long overdue transition from its out-of-date, decentralized, desktop-based case management system to the web-based, web-centric and wonderful Pika CMS. As best as we could, we documented and invited comment on what, how and why we were doing what were doing with Pika, which we heavily modified and pretty-fied but with abiding regard for Aaron’s solid core coding. We learned a lot in the process, and we hope we were helpful to those who visited and used the OpenPika site and the content we added to PikaDocs over the life of the site. If Webdogs 2.0 has any value, it is because OpenPika.org taught us how to do some things better.

OpenPika. The stuff of which memories are made. And they are all good.