Blog Tuesday January 6
Eric Gundersen
strategizer

Eric is President of Development Seed, an online strategy shop in Washington, DC. Eric has developed communications strategies and tools for organizations around the world, ranging from international development organizations to major media outlets. Recently he has been mapping food security projects in Africa, developing the intranet at the World Bank for their international communications team, and building decentralized data collection tools to survey public health organizations' capacity to respond to bird flu outbreak on the ground in Southeast Asia.

Archive
Excitement grows for Drupal and CivicSpace
May 27, 2005
by Eric Gundersen

In the first breakout session of the day (Tools and Ideas for Empowering the Edges) at the Personal Democracy Form last week, four out of the five panelists mentioned CivicSpace by name...

In the first breakout session of the day (Tools and Ideas for Empowering the Edges) at the Personal Democracy Form last week, four out of the five panelists mentioned CivicSpace by name. What is even more shocking is that this was not a techie or programmer group, it was people talking about the projects they were running and how to engage users online.Drupal and CivicSpace are hot right now. I have had conversations about Drupal with people from all different fields in the past two weeks, including blog visionary Jeff Jarvis at buzzmachine.com, cutting edge consultant Earl Mardle at Keynet, and people from community websites.

And there are some really good reasons for the excitement to keep growing. Drupal’s 4.6 (see Ian's late night airport post 'Running on 4.6') core remains lean, stable and fast and it is making room for new user needs easier content sorting, better sidebar administration  and trends - like rss 2.0 with enclosures for podcasters, and tagging (like on flickr.com and del.icio.us) to allow users of information to help organize it.   On top of Drupal's superior foundation and customizability that it is known for, a slew of new functionalities are in the works that will plug in existing sites. Two new modules that I am particularly excited about are: CiviCRM – a Customer Relationship Manager which even now in alpha is an amazing stand alone module to manage contacts and online campaigns. With its sleek and intuitive web interface and privacy controls, I bet it is going to be the killer app of the year once it is plugged into Drupal/CivicSpace in the next 3-6 months. It will amaze you that tools this powerful are free – try out the CiviCRM demo – with username/password of demo/demo.

Civicgroups – While I have not played with any code yet (honestly I am not sure if any exists), this seems to hold a lot of potential. Dan Robinson and the crew over at CivicActions are leading the project with the goal to create a turn-key plug into a Drupal site with a simple user interface to allow self-forming/self-managed groups a la Yahoo Groups.  In other good news, soon more targeted modules produced by the CiviSpace community can seamlessly work with the Drupal core.  With the next CS release (0.81) due out in days, the CS deployment will no longer be a forked version of drupal's core.

BTW – there is a nice post along these lines over at the Echo Chamber Project titled “Killer CivicSpace Apps on the Horizon” that is along these same lines since Kent and I were talking about just these sorts of developments on the phone earlier this week.  I also  recommend reading some of the posts he has on Folksonomy/tagging (wikipedia def for tagging.) like Using Folksonomy to Edit Film.

 

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2 Comments
Nicht vobla
Jul 25, 2005
Derek

Customer Relationship Manager is a good idea! Promote it!

CivicSpace to move all of our code to Drupal.org + Bug-Fix Frida
May 27, 2005
Seed Friend

on that note...  here is an email sent out to the CivicSpace listserv-

In an effort to move all of our code to Drupal.org, we plan on moving Bug-Fix Friday to Drupal.org as well.  I don't know yet whether this will be on Friday, or happen every week, but it will continue in one form or another.The reason for doing this is clear: while CivicSpaceLabs.org is a good place to host and design a Drupal distribution for a certain type of Drupal site, it is not the place to write/debug the actual code, with the exception of the coding that goes into packaging Drupal with a selected set of contributed modules into CivicSpace (the installer, configuration wizard, the 30 or so modules we add out-of-the-box, etc).  Most of the code is developed and maintained on Drupal.org, where all the other coders host their projects.  In short, Drupal.org is a much better place to fix bugs since it is home to a greater number of developers (who often discover bugs in each other's modules when they are being used together on a site).In moving the code for a handful of projects to drupal.org, I have already seen an increase in the rate at which bugs are discovered and patched.In summary, bug-submission will be relatively the same, with little change to the process for submitting a bug (we may aggregate bug reports from Drupal.org and/or add a submission form that simply posts your reports to drupal.org).  Support will be relatively the same.  For those that are interested in the bug-fix day that will be happening on Drupal, details will be available in the coming weeks as they are hammered out into a plan for a Bug Day on Drupal.org.

Much Thanks,

 -Ankur