webschuur.com

Recently, I came to realise that Drupal is not a community platform any more, it has grown into an editorial tool over the last years. Sure, you can build a community on top of Drupal, but the tools to do so, are underdeveloped, stale, or even simply unfinished. I see more and more high-profile editorial sites being build, and see fewer successful or high-profile community being released.

Not that there are no good examples of Communities built on Drupal, there are! But their amount is so small that they hardly count.

I just modified, configured and installed the Stammy RSS to Twitter script.

It will tweet new Drupal.org frontpage posts into the Drupal twitter home every 33 minutes (I like the number 33), if it all works, that is.

Just as everyone else, I am experimenting with ways to use Twitter. Feel free to post me any other ideas you have for the Drupal Twitters, I am interested in this new use of the web.

Taxonomy and freetagging as the spine of the site

I just finished the first phase of Kaisu.org. A site alike Nowpublic, in the sense that it allows you to make the news. The main difference is the angle to look at the news. KaiSu looks at the news from a ‘regional’ angle; allowing to look for local news near you.

Main features the client asked for were:

• a clear mechanism to “write to places”. You write news, or upload photo’s ad add them to a region.
• a way to allow adoption of a region.

Huston, we have a problem.
It might be an attitude problem, maybe a communication problem, but certainly a problem.

Nearly weekly we get some question in the Drupal forums about integration of some of these Full featured Bulletin boards.

Longer term Drupal users and developers all know that it is a) not as easy as it sounds and b) not necessary in 90% of thee cases. So this is not about integrating those, because there really s no need for that. I am confident that Drupal can do at least 75% of what phpBB can. Plus so much more witch phpBB cannot. The need is not to integrate this, but to offer an easier way to this functionality that people obviously miss, or cannot get working in Drupal.

Every political active person should be able to communicate and propagate his ideas through the internet. Greensnet ^[1] will be a new idea of networking between all European green and social organizations, parties and individuals . Not only will it be a free and open source distribution that anybody can use, but it will also make the process of creating a free and unbound website an easy process. On top of that the website will be networked to other greensnet sites. Because greensnet will run along with CivicSpace ^[2], a project similar to greensnet, but aimed at progressive politics in the US, we have a solid base to build on a progressive network.

The System will provide you with a huge range of features, the current features are listed below. Because we use the technology of civicspace, we offer the exact same features. Therefore the list below is the list of features as seen on civicspace.org

Blogs

• Threaded, sortable, searchable comments
• Every user gets a blog
• Run a powerful Scoop style community blog with peer moderation / promotion
• RSS feeds for community blogs and user blogs
• Import and republish remote blog entries via RSS
• Photo Galleries
• User Galleries
• Community Galleries
• Comments for images
• User Profiles
• Friend / Buddy Tracking
• Add friends to your list and keep track of their postings
• Polls
• File storage

Send targeted email

• Can handle up to 500,000 emails at once
• Query engine to for dynamic lists
• Save queries for future use
• Save, edit, and web-publish mails

Import and Aggregate Remote Content

• Sort, categorize, and republish imported content
• Republish remote content as
• Static Page
• Blog posts
• Forum threads

Manage your groups membership and contacts

• Sort and Search by any contact type
• Import member contact info via Excel CSV
• An account on one CivicSpace site can be used to log into another CivicSpace site
• Account profiles can be copied over automatically via FOAF

Organize Events

• Let members RSVP / email attendees
• Ride-Share board can organize carpooling
• Sync Events / Calendar with any other CivicSpace Site (via event name space RSS)
• Display events as Calendar or as List
• Export events to iCal

Collaboratively create, edit, and publish documents

• JavaScript WYSIWIG Editor
• Textile markup
• Create Books
• Automatically create hierarchy / index for pages
• Revisioning system lets you roll back user changes
• “Printer-Friendlyâ€? export

Easily create discussion forum + mailing lists

• Greenspace supports “Yahoo-Groups styleâ€? message forums
• You can mail entries to the forum
• You can post entries to the forum that will be sent out as mail the list
• Threaded and searchable
• Threads can be locked
• Threads never expires
• Create multiple forum + mailing-lists

Create forms and surveys for data collection

• Use web based interface to dynamically create web-surveys
• Export collected data as Excell CSV’s

And More! (We are just getting started….)

Greensnet: a progressive concept of networking

Initially, we hope people will use the software for fairly low-end kinds of online collaboration, in much the way people today use Yahoo Groups, a system of electronic-mail lists, to create small communities. By targeting greensnet at political organizers, with specialized tools, we hope to make such organizing easier and more efficient.

Greensnet is not related to any political party, nor to any organization. It is an independent open source initiative.

Based on the model and technology of the internet-based campaign of Howard Dean, the technology and model has already proven its value. But even more: it has proven to be a very effective method of internet campaigning. During the presidential campaign in the US this summer there was a lot of talk about the internet campaign by Howard Dean. The way that internet campaign is set up is not only unique, but was also very succesfull. This was due to a new concept of internet networking. The central place of the internet campaign was called Deanspace, now called Civicspace. Civicspace then again, uses Drupal ^[3] as main engine.

So what is greensnet looking for?

A host Greenspace looks a server to host its network. This server needs not be an extremely complex and heavyweight system, but should be capable of handling the network, database connections and the phpbased applications. On top of that it should be configurable enough to be able to let the network run as efficiently as possible. Requirements are Apache, PHP and Mysql.

Domain resellers Greenspace wants to connect its site installation wizard to domain hosting. So that the organization will own its own domain with the website, if they require so.

Funding Currently we are all running on volunteers. But to be able to build a community of professionals that can maintain and extend the network we need resources.

Manpower Anyone is very welcome to join the team and help build the system. Since it is open source anyone willing, can join.

Whether you are a designer, translator, writer, developer, programmer, interface architect, you can be of help!

Footnotes and more detailed information:

^[1] http://www.greensnet.org

^[2] http://www.civispace.org

^[3] http://www.drupal.org

For more information on this you might want to read:

An article about CivicSpace.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/8679986.htm

An article about social networking with drupal.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/build-online-community-drupal

An article about the new way of internet campaigning.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=7469

Or contact greensnet at:

ber@webschuur.com

address: Turnhoutsebaan 34/3

2140 Antwerpen

Belgium

For a new project I am investigation some true and non-geek (that is: not a site about sites, or a site about software) communities. A community off course must have some size. I came up with this list: http://www.tuttinudi.it/ http://www.mediagirl.org/ http://www.ecademy.com/ http://www.demolicious.org/ http://www.oasismag.com/