Is this group still active? Does it need some new blood? I might be interested.
Now that Drupal 7 is out, I continue to be embarrassed by the core Drupal Forum. In fact, I'm not even going to talk about the "Forums". What I want to see is a module that fosters building a Community. Instead of focusing on exactly which features Drupal Forum is missing compared to PHPBB or VBulletin (which is still a valid discussion to have), I would rather focus on something more fundamental: community building.
Imagine that you want to create a community site where members (or the general public) can post and comment on issues (Think of the new US Gov House of Representative initiatives as examples). We need a way to moderate discussions and let important topics percolate to the top of the queue. Look at other community sites, such as Slashdot, or Stack Overflow (etc). These are mostly self-moderated discussion sites where posts can be rated, reported, voted, etc. Important posts get promoted and spam/inappropriate posts disappear. Members have reputation. This is what you need to a real community site. Not just a port of PHPBB or VBulletin.
How can we do something like that with Drupal? Sure, there is the FiveStar module with Voting API. Maybe the Flag module for marking inappropriate posts. Maybe some sort of reputation module, such as Karma.
But how do we all get it to work together in a smooth way that regular people can install onto their site. With Drupal 7 we now have Distributions. There is also becoming more support for the Features modules. So maybe the solution is to put together some existing modules, with a bit of custom module "glue" and make a distribution or feature out of it.
I have 14+ years of experience running various community sites. And I believe that community discussions are becoming more and more important. It's a niche that Drupal does not serve well at all. I've messed around with all of the various addons to Forum (Advanced Forum, etc) for a couple of years and am not happy with the result. You can find posts going back several years (including a good post by webchick) about the lack of the Drupal forum system. There is a lot of work to be done to bring it all together into something easy to use (end users) moderate and manage.
Is anybody else interested in getting involved with me on something like this? Is there some other Drupal group I should be looking at? If this is the right place to start, then I can continue with more specific discussions. I will try to attend the Forum BOF tomorrow evening at DrupalCon Chicago (Thursday 3/9/11 at 5:45) to see if anybody else is interested. Come share your opinions. Let's improve this area of Drupal!
Comments
Yup.
I couldn't agree more.
I'm very interested in Drupal as community & collaboration tool (not through the lens of social software), areas that I think are grossly underdeveloped, but glimmering opportunities abound.
Projects I'm watching right now in this vein: Organic Groups Mailinglist, Make Meeting (similar to Doodle/Moreganize), Organic Groups Privacy , and Meetings (see: Ketchup (hosted service)).
Of course most of those aren't forum modules, but if I understand you properly, integrating these types of tools into the experience would be an important part of this goal.
I'm not in Chicago, but would be interested in taking part in discussions.
Other groups that may be relevant would be gdo/coop & gdo/drupal-for-activists-and-campaigns.
It's a thorny issue of semantics?
I'm all in! Having made my living as an online community manager for many years I am always amazed at how community and social media are used synonymously. To me, they are similar the same way that a passenger car and train are...each is a mode of transportation, will get you from point A to point B...but are very different in how they accomplish this.
Just came across a 'profile' which I've not yet installed, but will give a go later today. http://drupal.org/project/noc
Seems to me that this is more a thinking problem than a programmatic one?
Mark
I think it is both a thinking
I think it is both a thinking problem and then a programmatic one. I don't believe that any combination of existing modules actually really solves the problem. OG isn't the complete answer. Advanced Forums isn't the complete answer. You are correct that it is also not the same as "social media".
We definitely need to step back a bit, discuss and think about what communities really need/want from a discussion "forum". If you were at Drupalcon today and listened to the keynote talk by Jared Spool, I am talking about taking discussion "forums" from the "Feature" phase to the "Experience" phase.
Once we have thought about this, then there will definitely be some programmatic needs. Maybe it will just be patches to existing modules, or maybe it will be a new module. This is also an opportunity to start fresh with Drupal 7 and just provide migration tools from existing Drupal forums to whatever new system we create. The new entity system eliminates a lot of the previous controversy about nodes vs comments.
I don't want to discount any existing contributions. A lot of people have already worked very hard in this area (and most are in this group). We need to acknowledge their contributions and build on them where we can. But we also should be flexible and allow the possibility that we might need something new to move in a new direction.
When I get back from Drupalcon I will post another topic to really start talking about what specific customer problems I want to solve and what kind of new social behavior I want to encourage in community discussion sites. I've learned from talking about this with various people in person that we all have slightly different terminology and ideas about this and getting on the same page and communicating effectively will be the first challenge.
Edited: It would also be nice to find a client who needs a community discussion site who might be willing to fund some Drupal development work like this.
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I haven't done much with the group since I took it over, I'm afraid. Mostly because I've been busy making forums better rather than writing about how to make forums better so I hope that's a good tradeoff. ;)
At any rate, it sounds like you would be happier using either the Social Networking or Community groups as this one is rather narrowly focused on actual forums.
Michelle
This isn't Social Networking,
This isn't Social Networking, and (in my opinion) the Community group isn't focused enough to actually solve this problem and come up with a Drupal module or distribution to handle it. The description of this Forum Improvement group at the top of this page matches the most closely to what I'm talking about. But that's why the BOF will be useful to meet you and communicate more effectively what I'm talking about. It's definitely a "forum" kind of community discussion system that I'm looking for.
But if it turns out that this isn't the right group, or that no good group exists for this project, then I will go ahead and create a new group here or elsewhere for people to get involved. I don't want to hijack an existing group if it doesn't turn out to be a good fit.
As I mentioned previously, it will be important to take a step back from the details of what might have been done in the past and take a fresh look at what "discussion forum experience" our end users/clients might actually be looking for and how we can provide the best solution using Drupal. The way a "forum" works (or the way people want to use it) has evolved a lot since the original PHPBB days.
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Well, it's not like this group is so busy that you're not wanted or something. ;) I just meant that if you are moving beyond what most people think of as a forum that there are other groups that may be more suitable. You should also keep an eye on the brand new Support Infrastructure group. While that is focused specifically on drupal.org, the tools developed for it will be available for anyone to use.
Michelle