online community

As many of you may have heard, Ning recently eliminated its free networks and laid off 40% of its staff. Currently, Ning supports exporting users; for those of you interested in migrating your community members from Ning into Drupal, you have two well developed options at your disposal:

• User Import: http://drupal.org/project/user_import
• Feeds: http://drupal.org/project/feeds

If Ning ever opened up their APIs to allow content export, then importing the content would be equally straightforward. Both the Feeds module and the Node Import module would get the job done.

Another option for data import is a combination of the Table Wizard and the Migrate module.

If you are launching a Ning site now, setting up a Drupal site to import that content via RSS using the Feeds module wouldn't be a bad idea. Should Ning go out of business, or change their terms again, or if your organization makes the decision to take control of your web presence, your data (and the intellectual capital of your community) won't be in the hands of a content silo.

We formally submitted our Knight Drupal Initiative application last week. We're now officially in the pipeline; when we hear anything from the Knight Foundation we'll post details here.

Until then, this paragraph from our application sums up what we're trying to do:

We would like our project to help catalyze profound disruptions across several pre-existing markets. We would like to shift the definition of journalism; and we would like for this shift to diminish the reach and influence of corporate media outlets. We want citizen and community media to become more accessible, and barriers impeding prolonged collaboration between local, regional, national, and international groups to disappear. We would like to see schools and training organizations reduce their reliance on textbooks, as a secondary use of the tools created by our proposal is developing and distributing open courseware. On a more fundamental level, we want to see web publishing tools relegated to the level of the desktop text editor: something that we use daily without thinking or worrying about the details.