Jake DeGroot, a 26-year-old theater lighting designer from Queens who's helping develop the new site, said it would give the encampment's so-called working groups the chance to communicate with each other and the rest of the camp about the very real problems that this idealistic society faces. For example, what to do about those folks who come for the free food and freewheeling atmosphere and bring their drugs and violent tendencies? "In order to resolve those situations, we have a whole bunch of groups to take care of it. We have de-escalation and mediation, and security of course, and conflict resolution and town planning to talk about how the space is laid out, and medics to deal with any health repercussions," DeGroot says. But those groups can't get on the same page, DeGroot said, so they can't figure out how to solve the squatter problem. Plus, enforcing codes of conduct can be tough in a situation where nobody has authority and everything rides on consensus. "It’s a very tense thing. If security tries to enforce a code of conduct, a lot of people in camp will say, 'how dare you take authority? You have no authority over anyone here.' " In the encampment, the only authority comes through consensus. The site, DeGroot said, will "make the concerns more apparent to everyone in camp so that we have an easier time getting to consensus."

So the main purpose of the new site is to give each of the groups their own page, where members discuss how to do whatever it is they're working on, then those pages' feeds get posted on a central activity feed, which acts sort of like a Facebook news feed for the entire site. Members can also post individually on the main feed, and can message each other privately, but otherwise activity on the site is public. There's also an event calendar, bulletin board, and a weather forecast.

"The two troubles we have are that groups don't know what each other are doing, or we get a bottleneck with website administrators," Hornbein said. "The problem comes in when you have a set of administrators who are writing posts on behalf of the general assembly. That’s when issues arise because if I’m writing a post on occupywallst.org and I editorialize it at all, that could be perceived as the general assembly saying this, and that’s the issue." With nycga, the idea is that all the posts on the main feed come either from working groups or individuals. "The general assembly itself says very little." Administrators, Hornbein said, could remove inappropriate posts, but he doesn't think that will be a problem. "This isn’t an outward-facing site. This isn’t occupywallst.org, where people come and they really troll. It’s fairly boring stuff, it’s talking about what sanitation did today. And we catch most of the trolls on the main occupywallst.org website and are free to talk business on the nycga site."

Here are a couple more prototype images:

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.