DrupalNYC Meetup -- April 6th

Thanks Forest! See you there!

I have several responses to winston's comment, that this is a "Drupal meetup", and that a project to build a Drupal 7 based social action network for aiding the Japan nuclear crisis is somehow "straying" from the purpose of our Drupal meetup.

i: my immediate response is that this is a rather odd view about what should considered relevant for a Drupal meetup. Drupal is strongly associated with advocacy groups, and humanitarian efforts in general, and this aid project is very much in keeping with that tradition.

ii: I have no idea what is meant by the statement that "Those who have been attending the meetup ... know the problems our group had when we strayed too far from that"

I have been attending meetups for nearly 4 years, but I do not know what is meant by this. Please explain and/or give examples.

iii: To further clarify on the goal and design of the project, which is somewhat complicated, but not really unusual. The recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, etc. have shown the tremendous power that Twitter, Facebook and potentially other social media can give to people to resist improper actions by their governments and/or political or corporate groups.

The nuclear crisis at the Fukushima I plant is being clearly mishandled by the power company, TEPCO, who has supposedly been "partnering" with the Japanese government to respond to this emergency. If this is left up to TEPCO, there will be repeated delays and denials in how to properly deal with this crisis - in order to save money - until an even larger major radioactive release occurs that creates an even greater catastrophe for Japan and for the world. This is entirely analogous to the denials and delays that BP repeatedly made during the Caribbean oil crisis, that led to massive amounts of oil release into the environment for many months.

There is a need for an open, objective online forum for the various scientific, political, environmental, health and other issues to be presented clearly and accurately, so that the various possible problems and scenarios can be presented to the Japanese people. That is the "knowledge base" component of the Drupal site. So far, TEPCO and the government have kept them very much in the dark about the nuclear crisis, and the tremendous dangers it still presents. There also is a need for a forum in which the Japanese people can organize a social action network to build pressure on the government and TEPCO to respond properly to the response. That "social action network" is the other component of the Drupal site.

Drupal claims - and aspires - to be an important social media tool like Facebook and Twitter. This crisis is a situation in which there is a tremendous opportunity for Drupal to make an important contribution to mediating social action in a crisis situation, as Facebook and Twitter already have proven to be successful.

In particular, this is a tremendous opportunity to make great use of the many powerful features that Drupal provides: internalization tools for programmatically translating text between different languages, forums for threaded discussions of complex issues, a database of news articles and documents needed for evaluation of the crisis, integration with other social media such as Facebook and Twitter, etc. I really don't see how this project is "outside" the interests of the DrupalNYC meetup community.

I would like to have 20 minutes to describe the crisis situation, and explain how we can effectively use Drupal to aid the crisis response, before we break out in different groups.

If the presentation is about Drupal, the features on the site and how they're built, then it is a site showcase and seems appropriate as a presentation for the meetup.