Posts tagged with "organic groups"
Improving Knowledge Management at the World Bank with Drupal
Creating Group Work Spaces Using Organic Groups, Spaces & Context
We recently upgraded the knowledge management system of the World Bank’s communications team. We had worked with their team two years ago to build the system – then meant to facilitate internal communications and keep everyone informed on basic news – and when it came time to upgrade the site for infrastructure reasons, they decided to also expand the site’s toolset to facilitate organic conversations within and between different groups of users. Here’s what the new version looks like.

When the World Bank first approached us to work on this custom intranet, they had already committed some resources to Drupal and to open source projects in general, and they decided that they wanted to do this project on Drupal as well. We had also worked with them on several other Drupal-based projects (including the first version of their Poverty and Growth blog and their BuzzMonitor, an early proof of concept for an uber-aggregator like Managing News).
Introducing Spaces for Drupal
Leveraging Organic Groups and Context to Extend Custom Features Within Groups
We do a lot of work building portals and intranets that provide collaborative online spaces for professional communities. Some of these projects are completely private sites, and some are open to larger user groups. In each case we need to provide a toolset that could be configured differently for each site and frequently tweaked in particular groups. To do this we've built Spaces. It's a module that leverages Organic Groups to relate users and content to groups, and it extends context_ui to define 'features' that can be control individually in each group. Spaces also makes assumptions about how you want groups to work and so is able to reduce the options available when creating groups and posts in groups, making the group creation and content posting processes more intuitive.
To get a sense of how this module works I have taken two screen shots from our own intranet package that we call 8trees. Here you are looking at our own team space on the 8trees install that we run for ourselves to communicate with our clients. It provided us with a terrific way to test code and ideas on a captive and critical (but forgiving) audience. Clients never know there is anything but their own little space, but we move quickly and easily between them and have different tools (blog/book/casetrack/calander) turned on for different clients depending what stage the project is in. This is what spaces lets us do.
Creating Custom Workflows for Drupal Applications
Taking Advantage of Core Hooks and Context
At 3:30 pm on Wednesday March 5 I'll be presenting with Jeff Miccolis on some of the ideas that have been
circulating around the Development Seed office on how to tackle the simple but elusive concept of context in Drupal. We'll tackle the topic in classic academic style: define the scope of the problem, review the relevant literature (i.e. we'll look at the code of some seminal modules), look at an exemplary case study (Managing News), and then show how context can help you make a more usable Drupal site.

