Drupal

We're getting very close to completing the application for the Knight Foundation on our Knight Drupal Initiative proposal.

Out of curiosity, I figured I'd run it through Wordle and see what turned up.

The Knight Drupal Initiative proceeds apace. Last week, two additional projects were approved to be forwarded along to the Knight Foundation, and there is a third strong proposal under consideration. If you are a Drupal developer, and/or have an idea about how to combine your love of open source software with your desire to change how we communicate, get a proposal in.

We are in the midst of refining our proposal prior to submission to the Knight Foundation. It's been a useful process, as it has forced us to take a step back from our thoughts and ideas and find a method of communicating them to a general audience. This post gives a summary of what we are thinking; if you are so inclined, please leave any feedback in the comments.

Need: What journalistic or public need will the proposed project address? How was the need identified?

Schools, non-profits, community organizations, and traditional media have all struggled with how to update their approach to their mission through effective use of social media. Over the last few years, while mainstream media outlets have made forays into these areas (albeit with limited success) smaller organizations have been constrained due to financial and technical barriers. Our Local Publishing Platform seeks to eliminate the technical barriers and minimize the financial barriers.

The Aggregation Hub seeks to eliminate another issue affecting smaller organizations ranging from local papers to community-run advocacy groups around varying issues: frequently, these organizations have limited knowledge about similar work being done by other groups. The aggregation hub, at its most basic, would provide a centralized resource for groups with a common mission. Over time, the aggregation hub could serve as a springboard for greater collaboration. With services like Twitter, we have seen the power of loose connections, and how in specific circumstances these types of lightweight connections can lead to more meaningful exchanges.

These needs were identified in a variety of ways: primarily, we observed common patterns of community involvement and development as part of our own work, as we are actively involved in several different online communities. Second, countless people – from clients to other social media professionals to heads of community organizations – identified a subset of these needs as issues they were struggling within their own organizations. As we talked with different organizations doing a wide range of work – from organizing resources around School-Based Health Care, to running online magazines for K-12 students, from supporting Action Research as part of Teacher Professional Development, to developing Community Published Journalism platforms, to building out a news and services directory to support agriculture among rural communities in Southeast Asia, a set of common needs emerged: people wanted to publish easily from a variety of sources, and collect these posts in a central place. Taken individually, these are all interesting projects; taken collectively, they have the potential to shift how we view “news,” and who has a right to “make” it. While these ideas have been around for a while (depending on how you want to look at it, they can be sourced to the advent of the Social Web or, arguably, to the advent of the web browser as Tim Berners-Lee first envisioned it, the promise has yet to materialize. Sophisticated, easy to use tools remain beyond the reach of many grassroots communities. This project aims to meet that need.

Proposed Project: Briefly summarize the project for which Knight Foundation funding is requested. Relate the project to the needs identified above.

As described above, the needs can be condensed down into two discrete categories

1. Local Publishing Platform: A more efficient means of communicating.
• Accepts input from web and mobile devices;
• Seamlessly handles images, audio, text, and video;
• Easy to install, maintain, and use;
• Can support simple group blogs to more structured channels or magazines;
• Can support publish-on-demand alongside community rating and editorial review.
2. Regional Aggregation Hub: A more efficient way of creating community knowledge.
• Low barrier to entry – participating groups do not need to make significant changes to their current procedures;
• Over time, accumulated content forms a searchable archive of information contributed by different community members and organizations;
• Provides a means of both highlighting the work of individual organizations, and amplifying the voice of loosely connected groups;
• The strength of loose ties -- shared content in the same “space” creates an initial connection that can be used as a starting point for more comprehensive collaboration.

Within both sites, various methods of “visualizing” a community can be employed. This visualization can be rendered based on geography, content, tags, users, frequency of posts, or any combination thereof.
In our proposal, we request funding to build these two resources. The Local Publishing Platform will address the needs of individuals and organizations as they communicate their message to a broader audience. This site will be available as a downloadable platform from Drupal.org, and will have a full suite of documentation describing how to install, modify and use the site. Our goal is to build a base profile that can be installed within the space of about 15 minutes (an average time of a standard Drupal install). This initial install will contain some sensible defaults to support several common publishing scenarios.

The second site, the Aggregation Hub, will be made available in the form of a site recipe. Like the Local Publishing Platform, all the code needed to build this site will be freely available for download from Drupal.org. The documentation will describe how to install and configure the site. As the expressed needs of the Aggregation Hub cover a broader range of functionality than the Local Publishing Platform, documenting the base install and additional use cases will allow us to build a tool that will be useful to a larger audience.

Both of these projects can be replicated and installed by any organization that wants to use it. To emphasize: this is not software as a service, and it is not a tool that an organization needs to rely on a third party to provide or support.

An Overview

If you have an interest in new media, new approaches to traditional media, online publishing, community work, or a basic interest in how to use the web to communicate within a community, you need to stop reading this post and check out the Knight Drupal Initiative.

Okay. Glad to have you back.

This initiative, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, aims to support Drupal-based projects that lower barriers to participation in community development and new media. This program has several distinguishing characteristics, including:

• A transparent community review process -- all projects are publicly reviewed, with monthly reviews/meetings taking place via IRC, and these IRC sessions are logged and made publicly available.
• The program is ongoing, and accepts rolling applications. In other words, if you are a Drupal developer and have an idea that will change the way people interact with/make news, you need to get your thoughts together, and submit a proposal.

Also, take a little time and review the existing proposals -- there are currently three proposals slated for review. As mentioned before, this is an open review process, and anyone with constructive feedback can participate in the review process.

Finally, all interested parties can play a role in the monthly meetings when proposals are publicly reviewed. The next meeting is slated for August 7th, at 3:00 PM Eastern time.

Our Proposal

We submitted a proposal in early May. The full writeup goes into more detail, but to summarize, our proposal aims to simplify the process of community building -- and support grassroots media -- in two ways: first, by creating a powerful, flexible platform that can be up and running within 10-15 minutes; and second, by creating a platform that multiple organizations can use to share information about related work on a regional, national, or international level.

At the risk of stating the obvious, these tools will be freely available for any and all to use. In our proposal, we also dedicate time to document how to use and extend these tools. Our goal is to build and document a resource that can be used by anyone.

We are incredibly happy to announce that our proposal has been vetted and approved by the Drupal community, and recommended to the Knight Foundation for consideration. In other words, we have passed the first hurdle. Now, we are working directly with representatives from the Knight Foundation as we complete our official proposal. As things progress, I'll post updates via the blog.

All of our Knight Drupal Initiative posts will be available here; with their own RSS feed.

Over on the Infinite Thinking Machine, Wesley Fryer has a blog post about creating a Netflix-style website for readers, with an emphasis on COPPA compliance for readers under 13.

Here's how I'd go about building that site using Drupal.

The main functional requirements:

These requirements are pulled and paraphrased from Wes' post; any that I have added are italicized.

• COPPA compliant -- no personal data collected from minors without the prior consent of an adult;
• Readers can rate books they have read;
• Readers can create lists of friends; these "friendships" can be one way, or reciprocal;
• Readers can write reviews on books; these reviews can be shared publicly, or privately between friends;
• The site should recommend books to readers based on their likes and dislikes of other books;
• Readers should be able to see what their friends are reading, and any reviews/recommendations of their friends;
• Readers should be able to keep a reading log on the site; this reading log should have the ability to be public or private;
• Readers should be able to form public and private groups/communities.

There are other features that will need attention, of course; for example, a site like this will require a detail-rich user profile page, and pages for recent recommendations, featured books, featured readers, etc.

Building the Site:

As a start, in addition to Drupal core, we'll need the CCK, Views, and Organic Groups modules. These modules will provide the main functionality to power the site. Other modules will be discussed in context below.

For user profiles, we'll use the Bio module.

For book ratings, we'll use the VotingAPI and the FiveStar modules.

For friends, we have a few different possibilities, and the best choice for the specific site would require some module evaluation. The shortlist: Buddylist (the original module of this type in Drupal, which we have used and liked in the past); Buddylist2 (an upgrade of Buddylist that looks promising, but it is younger code and we have yet to try it); and the Friend and Notice modules (also newer than Buddylist. Another possibility is the User Relationships module, that came out around the same time as Buddylist2. The "best" solution here will require some analysis of the existing code, cross-referenced against some precise descriptions of the desired functionality. This is also a place where the right design and UI is critical.

Views of friends recommendations, reading lists, etc: the Views module.

Reading log: CCK, with access control via the Coherent Access module.

Book reviews: CCK, with access control via Coherent Access

COPPA: this requires some custom development. We actually have some COPPA code that we worked on a while back that we need to dust off, clean up, and release. At its most basic, we need to branch the registration process, with all users under 13 directed to get their parent, or (alternately) to enter their parent's email address. The specifics would need to be vetted with legal counsel.

Content Recommendation: this is where things get interesting, and we have a few options. The shortest route could be dusting off the Content Recommendation Engine. We could also get some basic recommendations by looking at content a reader has reviewed favorably, looking at other readers who have reviewed that item favorably, and then drawing from their lists of recommended items. Also, creating lists of similar items when looking at both books and book reviews would be a nice feature to have. In short, content recommendation would also require some custom development, with the Content Recommendation Engine, the Similar by Terms module, the Similar Module, and the Memetracker all having code that could be useful/relevant for this project.

Public and Private Communities: Organic Groups, with Views to customize how content is presented within groups.

Module List

A list of the modules mentioned in this post:

Organic Groups
Views
CCK
Bio
Voting API
FiveStar
Buddylist
Buddtlist2
Friend
Notice
User Relationships
Coherent Access
Content Recommendation Engine
Similar Entries
Similar by Terms
Memetracker

Wrapping Up

This is a quick overview. As with any implementation, the details would need to be clarified to the point where we could generate solid design mockups of the key screens. But, given what I've seen of the functional requirements, Drupal would provide an ideal platform for this functionality. Building this site in Drupal, from open source components, and documenting the process would allow any organization who wanted a site like this to create it; or, several schools could join together to use a common space.

The Summer of Code application process is underway. Along with some good folks at The Oregon State Open Source Labs, we have put together a proposal to share content between Moodle and Drupal.

In combination with the recently developed functionality to author and export content from Drupal in IMS LOM format, you could author courses in Drupal or Moodle, and use those courses interchangeably in Drupal, Moodle, or any other LMS that imported IMS LOM.