Edit, July 10 This proposal has been passed along to the Knight Foundation for consideration: http://drupal.org/node/281048 End Edit
This project will create two complementary sites: a Local Publishing Platform paired with a Regional Aggregation Hub.
The Publishing Platform will support a range of activities, from a K12 school magazine, a community paper, a writing project (something like the National Writing Project or Youth Radio), a college paper, etc.
The Aggregation Hub will provide a way for these different organizations to work together without losing any editorial control, or diluting the mission of the participating organizations.
Some use cases
Within a school district: individual school newspapers publish using the local publishing platform; selected articles are republished into a district-wide aggregation hub
Between colleges: college papers put out their local editions using the local publishing platform; selected articles get republished into a Best of the College Press site aggregation hub
Between writing projects: local writing projects publish and support student journalism using the local publishing platform; these projects can then work together to highlight student writing republished using the aggregation hub
Between related non-profits/socially conscious organizations: each individual non-profit maintains its own web presence and community using the local publishing platform; the voice of these individual organizations can be united within the aggregation hub. For example, you could have organizations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Portland, New Orleans, and Miami all creating separate web sites to publish news stories, essays, and fiction written by homeless youth. Then, a national organization could aggregate selected stories from each site.
Using these related sites, each local organization retains the freedom to work as they deem necessary, and still collaborate with other organizations with a regional, national, or international focus.
The Aggregation Hub will also work with non-Drupal sites, as it can republish any content exposed via an RSS feed.
Project Deliverables
Edit: The code deliverables in this proposal target Drupal 6. End edit
- An install profile for the Local Publishing Platform, hosted and available on drupal.org
- A theme, designed to support the functionality of the Local Publishing Platform, hosted and available on drupal.org
- End-user and administrative documentation/screencasts on using and extending the Local Publishing Platform. This documentation will include both how to publish content and (for example) how to set up publishing workflows, user ratings, and extended user profiles. This documentation will be freely available as part of the Drupal handbooks.
- Documentation/screencasts on setting up the Aggregation Hub. Like the documentation for the Local Publishing Platform, this documentation will be added to the Drupal handbooks.
- Present the Local Publishing Platform and Aggregation Hub at two national/international conferences; ideally, one conference would be focused on education, and the second would be focused on citizen journalism
In addition to these specific deliverables, the project will produce some new code, both in the form of patches to existing contributed modules, or in the form of new modules. Whenever possible, we will work with existing modules, and module maintainers, to leverage the existing codebase in order to eliminate unnecessary duplication.
An overview of the Local Publishing Platform
The Local Publishing Platform will allow site members to post text, audio, video, and images to the site. Additionally, content can also be posted via mobile phone.
The site will be configured to support editions (ie, Volume 1, or April, 2008) and sections (Sports, Real Estate, Fair Housing, etc). Additionally, the site will come pre-configured with publication workflows.
Editors will be able to structure/organize content, and, if workflows are enabled, editors will be able to move content through the publishing workflows.
We will look to handle publication from mobile phones by extending the Mailhandler and Mailsave modules to integrate cleanly with Embedded Media fields.
Whenever necessary, we will work with existing module maintainers to port modules to Drupal 6. Also, as part of the goal of this project is to document the steps involved to create and use the site, any new development will be accompanied by screencasts and/or text documentation.
The publishing and display of data will be managed using CCK, various CCK fields (imagefield, embedded media field, link field), Views, and Taxonomy. Workflow and Triggers will be used to set up publishing workflows; these workflows will be configured with the default profile, and (unless we hear strongly otherwise) will be turned off by default.
The Local Publishing Platform will be available and maintained as an install profile on drupal.org. The default configuration will contain all the tools needed to power a community writing/news site. Accompanying documentation and screencasts will explain how to use, extend and customize the site.
An overview of the Aggregation Hub
The Aggregation Hub provides a way for an organization to centralize, highlight, or re-publish posts from affiliated groups. As described above in the "Use Cases" section, the Aggregation Hub allows for different organizations to collaborate/connect as needed without losing any editorial control, or diluting their organizational mission.
Additionally, the Aggregation Hub will work with any site that has an rss feed. While the Aggregation Hub will be designed to take advantage of some specific design choices in the Local Publishing Platform (most specifically around media handling), the hub can republish articles from any site that generates an rss feed.
The Aggregation Hub will be powered by the FeedAPI, the Feed Element Mappers, CCK (and related fields), Views, and core Taxonomy.
The Development Process
As we develop this project, we will be guided by these general guidelines:
- Transparency: we will keep a development blog tracking our progress. Ideally, we would create a group on g.d.o for these posts.
- Collaboration/Avoid Duplication: one of the goals of the initial research is to identify ongoing work that could relate to this project, and the project goals. Then, we would be able to contact those module maintainers and, wherever possible, develop a plan that meets all of our needs as we move forward.
- Timely Releases: as we develop code during this project, we will release it as soon as possible. This will allow people to work with what we have created, and will (hopefully) broaden the number of people actively testing the code.
- Document Everything: at the risk of stating the obvious, this applies to comments in the code and the theme, as well as end user and site admin documentation.
This proposal aligns cleanly with the goals of the Knight Drupal Initiative.
The deliverables of this project lower the technical barriers to entry by creating a stable publishing platform that can be installed and running within minutes. Once the platform has been installed, the site can be extended in a number of ways with the accompanying documentation. When completed, the Local Publishing Platform will dramatically reduce the expense (in both time and money) needed to launch a community news site. This project has the potential to reduce the financial cost of a web presence; while organizations will always incur a cost for hosting and ongoing maintenance, this project seeks to eliminate much or all of the expense required to launch a community-centered news publishing platform.
This site will be freely available under the GPL on drupal.org, and fully documented. The accompanying documentation will be directly applicable to the site; additionally, it will provide a solid grounding in configuring views, cck, the feedapi, and taxonomy to meet a specific use case. This documentation will likely be of interest to a general audience, in addition to people using the publishing platform and the aggregation hub.
By lowering the technical barriers to launching and maintaining powerful web sites, we want to enable more people to publish content. In particular, we would love to empower people who would otherwise be shut out of the conversation (for reasons of cost, the technical complexity of building a publishing platform, or any other reason). We see building the site and writing code as the beginning of the process; documentation, advocacy and outreach are all part of the essential followup work, and will help increase the use of the platform. The Local Publishing Platform and the Aggregation Hub are two tools that eliminate barriers in the way of organizations seeking to fulfill their missions in a cost-effective way.
We envision a development timeline of approximately six months, with publicity and dissemination occurring in the months after the development has been completed and the final version of the project has been released.
-
Month 1:
- code research. Note: this research will add focus to the development needed for this project. We have already done some preliminary research, but we will drill down to a greater degree of specificity before starting development to ensure that we are not replicating ongoing efforts, and are creating as flexible a solution as possible.
- user stories
- design wireframes for the local publishing platform and the aggregation hub
-
Months 2 and 3:
- initial site config: cck node types, field definitions, basic views config
- mailhandler development
- standardize how media (audio, video, and images) is handled within the publishing platform.
- Initial build of the aggregation hub: user roles, feedapi config, views, cck node type(s) to import content, FeedMapper and Embedded Media Field development to handle media from feeds
-
Months 4 and 5:
- Initial release of install profile for the local publishing platform
- Two conferences to present the sites will have been identified/registered. Other opportunities to publicize the sites will also be identified/explored.
- Ongoing development: Media Handling within feeds, Mobile publishing, Feed Mapping, Install Profile work, and other issues that have been identified during the development cycle.
- Ongoing Site Administration and Config: within the local publishing platform, create the structure for editions, publishing workflows, and content administration menus. Within the aggregation hub, create the taxonomy structure and views necessary to highlight posts by topic, date, author, and original source.
- Begin Documentation for the Local Publishing Platform and the Aggregation Hub
-
Month 6:
- Final Release -- Install Profile for the Local Publishing Platform
- Finish the end user and administrator documentation
- Finish the site recipe and documentation for the Aggregation hub.
-
Months 7, 8, 9:
- Present the publishing platform/aggregation hub at 2 conferences. Ideally, one conference will be an education-related conference; and the second will be a media/publishing related conference.
Distribution of Deliverables
The install profile for the local publishing platform will be hosted on drupal.org
The theme developed for this project will be hosted on drupal.org
End user and administrative documentation for the local publishing platform will be in the drupal.org handbooks.
The site recipe and documentation for the aggregation hub will be in the handbooks.
Any materials prepared for presentations will be added to the handbooks, or as links off the project page, as appropriate.
The project page for the install profile will contain links to all relevant documentation.
The Team
This proposal has been created by FunnyMonkey. Bill Fitzgerald, Marc Poris, and Jeff Graham are all full-time with FunnyMonkey, and Joon Park has worked with FunnyMonkey on a number of different projects. Bill is the manager of the Drupal in Education group; Marc maintains several modules on drupal.org; Jeff is an experienced developer coming into the Drupal community after working as the lead LMS developer at Humboldt state; and Joon is a core maintainer for the theming system.
Bill Fitzgerald, project lead: bonobo | d.o | g.d.o
Marc Poris, technical lead: marcp | d.o | g.d.o
The time estimates here are best estimates based on the following factors:
- Our preliminary research into the status of the codebase for the different contrib modules we will need to use or extend;
- Our past experience in custom module development;
- Our past experience with theme development, and cross-browser compatibility checking;
- Our past experience with building sites involving custom development, design, and complex site configuration.
Development
- Research.
- Mailhandler/related SMS development.
- Install Profile -- we would want our work on the install profile to help improve the way install profiles work, with an eye toward extending profiles in contrib for D6, and for possible inclusion in core for D7. I have seen some posts re targeting specific versions of modules and including them in a distribution package, and we will research this further to ensure that we synch up with ongoing efforts here. We are also interested in working on/improving the "install profile as wizard" functionality to allow for more flexible installs to support a broader range of use cases.
- FeedAPI related development.
Design, Site Config, and Documentation
- Graphic and Theme design for a theme targeting XHTML strict validation, with valid css, that displays cleanly in IE, FF, and Safari. This theme will be available on Drupal.org; the look and feel will support the functionality of the local publishing platform and the aggregation hub.
- Site Config for the Local Publishing Platform: User Roles and Permissions, Workflows, Taxonomy Structure, Menus, Blocks, CCK Node Types, Views. Test functionality for all content types, workflows, views; with all applicable roles, in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.
- Site Config for the Aggregation Hub: FeedAPI settings, User Roles and Permissions, Workflows, Taxonomy Structure, Menus, Blocks, CCK Node Types, Views -- Note: much of the structure of the Aggregation Hub can be borrowed and modified from the Local Publishing Platform, which results in less config and testing time needed for the Aggregation Hub.
- Documentation, Local Publishing Platform.
- Documentation, Aggregation Hub.
Presentation/Evangelizing
-
Travel, Room and Board for 2 people to 2 conferences to present the project
- Airfare and Hotel, Conference 1
- Airfare and Hotel, Conference 2
Budget Summary
Research, Development, and Documentation: 4 people at 100 hours at 100/hr: 40,000.00
Front End Site Configuration: 2 people at 100 hours at 100/hr: 20,000.00
Testing and QA: 4 people at 15 hours at 100/hr: 6,000
Travel/Hotel to 2 Conferences for 2 people: 4,000.00
Total Budget: 70,000.00
Comments
Nice work, Bill
This is a great first proposal, and I think it is very much in line with the program.
Two quick notes:
My rating is a 4. I don't see this as essential, but I do see it as worthy.
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
Thanks for the feedback --
RE version: yes, this will be in D6 -- I will edit the proposal to reflect this.
RE the install profile for the aggregation hub: We went back and forth on this, and opted to document how to build the aggregation hub via a site recipe as opposed to a full install profile for the reasons listed below. With that said, we could easily be convinced to include an install profile for the aggregation hub.
Our reasons for building a site recipe for the aggregation hub instead of a profile:
The aggregation hub is slightly more difficult to run, and can require more server resources/expertise to maintain over time. We didn't want to create a situation where an organization set up a site that became cumbersome/impractical to maintain. Our thinking was that a detailed set of documentation would lower the barrier to entry, and allow us to document the server requirements more effectively for end users.
Maintainability: we intent to maintain the code we release for this (and other) projects. In the interest of not stretching ourselves too thin after this project has been completed, we opted not to create a second install profile to reduce the time overhead of maintaining the project.
Documentation stays current longer/can be modified more easily than install profiles. There is also a SOC project focusing on a new aggregator for core by many of the same folks that brought us the FeedAPI -- this has the potential to change the way we aggregate feeds, which also has implications for the install profile. In our estimation, for the Aggregation Hub, documentation/a site recipe has the potential to strike the best balance between lowering the barrier now, and being immediately useful 1 year from now.
With that said, though, there are some great counterarguments in favor of an install profile, and we'd be open to adjusting our proposal if the community saw it otherwise.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Excellent proposal
Are you sure you've budgeted enough hours?
RE hours
Yeah, we could be a little light on this -- the most complex piece (as we see it, anyways) involves the install profile. Specifically, we are interested in extending more of a wizard-like functionality into install profiles. The work ahead of us on this includes porting the Install API (unless webchick beats us to it :) ) to D6, building on the work done on creating cck fields programatically, and seeing the full scope of what is available wrt profiles in D6 as compared to D5 --
As one of our goals is to have our work (hopefully) improve core install profiles in D7, we will also work closely with the community, and, where appropriate, contribute core patches for D7.
So are the hours possibly on the low side? Yes, they could be, but not impossibly so, IMO. And with that said, this is a project we believe in, and want to make happen.
Thanks,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
in D6 can now
Awesome.
We did some work looking at install profiles in D5, and haven't looked very closely at them in D6 -- the bulk of our research so far has been around mapping from feeds with the FeedAPI/FEMP -- on the basis of this, I'm looking forward to seeing what can be done -- comments like this made me a little nervous :)
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
More on install profiles
We'd definitely look to connect with this: http://groups.drupal.org/node/11691 -- this is actually very close to what we were thinking --
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Been thinking and researching on this a bit more
The local publishing platform could also be useful in connection with sites like Spot.us (when it develops/goes live) -- the publishing platform/agg hub could help in spotting stories of interest around a region.
Modules like the Calais module (see discussion here) and the Memetracker (note: we are the mentors on this SoC project) would make emerging trends, or areas of common/shared interest easier to spot. These could then be funneled into a site like spot.us as possible stories to be explored in more depth.
The central piece here is to create a powerful publishing platform that is easy to launch and maintain.
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Getting it
I don't know why it has taken me so long to "get it," but the conceptual frame around this work seems obvious to me now. It's exactly what we've been dancing around on so many Teachers Teaching Teachers webcasts... and in thinking about how to bring together all of the wikis and ed.voicethread accounts and elggs, and blogs, and tumblrs, and nings... and the stuff that flies around our network of Writing Project and World Bridges teachers.
2 awesome ideas - boil them down to 1?
I love both ideas - the publishing plattform and the aggregation hub. I think the aggregation hub is the more exciting one because it's a less used technology and can be a very powerful promoter of community (think Drupal planet).
Given time and budget, I wonder whether it would make sense to focus on one of those aspects.
2 projects I feel reminded of:
http://www.placeblogger.com/
http://www.everyblock.com/
http://www.twitter.com/lxbarth
2 or 1
Hello, Alex,
Thank for the feedback -- RE: "I think the aggregation hub is the more exciting one because it's a less used technology and can be a very powerful promoter of community" -- fully agreed. I also think that part of the reason that it is less used is that the power of it isn't as fully understood. In very general terms, people are starting to get blogging, and are starting to get online publishing. However, they aren't understanding the way that aggregation can amplify a distributed voice, in large part because the tools that collect these voices have been focused more on individuals than communities (think rss readers, or even something like pageflakes/pipes). The aggregation experiments I've been doing over the last few months, and the various conversations I've been having with different organizations, have all helped me realize different ways that these tools can be used to loosely organize communities with common goals/vision. For example, I'm meeting tomorrow with a non-profit working with school-based health centers. These organizations are working throughout the states, but largely in isolation. A site that aggregated even infrequent posts from different orgs doing similar work would have a unifying effect on their work, and help stimulate conversations.
You also mention: "Given time and budget, I wonder whether it would make sense to focus on one of those aspects." -- Robert also had a similar comment -- do you think we're low on hours?
We have done some preliminary research, and built out some sites using the various pieces of code we envision using for this, and made our estimate based on that. But, given your experience with the FeedAPI (and overall drupal-ninja status :) ) I'd love to hear any feedback re time and hours.
I'm pretty committed to the two sites as complementary pieces of the whole. While they don't need to be used together (ie, an org can build a local publishing platform, an aggregation hub, or both, or build the agg hub within their publishing platform -- all depending on their particular goals) they are designed to be mutually supportive -- they both work independently, but one extends the other -- the smaller communities reach out/connect with larger communities, from the context of the mission/work/events of the smaller community. As I look at it, it's micro meets macro.
And thanks for the links to placeblogger and everyblock.com -- both very cool sites. I wish I had gotten the chance to meet Lisa Williams at Drupalcon --
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
on integrating aggegration and publishing
There's a nice thread going on the idea of integrating the aggregation and the publishing sides of things at darcynorman.net.
I really like the idea of having both sides of the coin sitting together and tightly integrated.
~~~
doug worsham
http://lss.wisc.edu/~doug
http://unionblend.uniblogs.org/
Hours Feedback
I weighed in on this with my vote and have kept quiet otherwise. FWIW, my initial reaction on hours was the same as both Robert's and Alex's, however. To the extent that you hear that multiple times and want to recalculate things, here's another small voice agreeing that you've got a lot of work to do and not much wiggle room in your estimates.
I know this was tough position as you were the first proposal and are already asking for a non-trivial budget. But, I think the concerns are valid and you may want to re-run your numbers to make sure you're comfortable with them.
Drew Gorton
Gorton Studios
Thanks for the feedback --
Hello, Drew,
Thanks for the feedback, and re: "To the extent that you hear that multiple times and want to recalculate things, here's another small voice agreeing that you've got a lot of work to do and not much wiggle room in your estimates." -- point well taken.
We'll be looking more closely at our numbers, and time estimates. As I said to Robert and Alex, this is a project we believe in, and something we want to see built. And, as you point out, we are already asking for a significant amount of money.
But with that said, I see this proposal being something of a game changer when it comes to empowering smaller voices that have a difficult time being heard, and toward that end I think your advice is dead on, and that no one wins if we under-budget.
I was reading through my aggregator today, and saw this post from Ethan Zuckerman where he talks about The Future of Civic Media Conference for the Knight News Challenge winners from the last two years --
From Ethan's post:
Supporting these types of community relationships (the remix culture, creating a platform that lets members of a community -- geographic, interest-based, or a community by any other definition/combination) is the main goal of this proposal. We want to build a tool that reduces/eliminates the technological barriers to community/personal expression -- something that gets technology out of the way of the "personal relationships" --
Which is all a long way of saying thanks for the feedback :)
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Bill - In both scenarios,
Bill - In both scenarios, there are a lot of details to solve, in fact, both tools can be amazing if you nail these details like the sign up process, easy adding and managing your content or subscriptions, notifications, fun commenting, click statistics, easy install process etc.
While it's true that Drupal allows you to build amazing tools fast, bringing these tools to the level where they are easily usable and understandable for non-geeks is usually hard work that requires its time.
It's from that perspective that I'd say that with the given amount of hours, you will be tight on time for doing both parts of the project, but you have the manpower to do one of them really good.
http://www.twitter.com/lxbarth
Largely Agree
Alex is spot-on with his comments and the time it takes to put on the layers of refinements -- which are so essential to long-term success. You've got a pretty impressive-looking team and are going to be a much better judge of your abilities than me, though.
You've certainly put more thought into all of this than we have, and you're already a ways down this path:
Which puts you in a better position to judge the size of the remaining tasks as well. So - I'm not as sure that you're under-estimating the hours - I only know that it causes me to hesitate. One thought that occurred to me on reading Alex's post, though, was that you may have two grants here, not one.
Also - it's worth explicitly noting that my perspective is that one outstanding tool is worth far more than two pretty-good tools.
Drew Gorton
Gorton Studios
Details and implementation; code and documentation
Hello, Alex and Drew,
Thanks for the feedback on this -- it's incredibly helpful in continuing to think through this process.
RE:
Absolutely -- the most elegant of technical solutions loses value if it's buried under poor usability. In building this out, we are looking to pair the core functionality of the publishing platform with documentation on how to both use it and extend it. In the timeline I lay out in the original proposal, we spend a portion of the first month creating user stories; we have been talking with potential users (people/organizations doing different types of work within various communities) to help inform this process. We see the process of nailing the details as a blend of creating user stories that represent "typical" use cases, coding/theming a UI that supports the various user stories, and then documenting how to use and extend the default. This is an area where we have already solicited input from various people, and if we are fortunate enough to have our proposal accepted, we would look to solicit additional input from the community.
RE:
Fully agreed. In the last year, we have brought three sites for clients that incorporate user publishing within a community context. In crafting the UI for these sites, we found that we needed to ground the user experience in a consistent, predictable place, and have some clearly defined options that "followed" the user around the site -- in one of these sites, we placed these options in a block we called "Useful Places" (built using the Jump module) -- this allowed the user to quickly get back to a set of predictable places within the site: their profile page, their group overview page (a customized overview of their group content), etc. Creating user stories helped us create a user experience that made sense for the client and their goals for the site, and from a design place it helped cement an aesthetic/approach that leads us to streamline the options presented to users in specific contexts -- basically, eliminate links/options/menus that don't fit the context to eliminate clutter on the page. But, this level of minimalism takes a lot of planning -- it's a lot of work making things simple, and more work still to document things effectively.
RE:
I'm with you here as well. I'd prefer two outstanding tools, though :) -- I hear what you're saying re two projects -- however, in conceptualizing this, I see these two sites as complementary pieces for empowering communities. I'd hesitate to separate them into two proposals because of the way they work together, and support each other. The fact that the aggregation hub can function on its own, or as a part of the publishing platform (depending on organizational need) is another reason (for me, anyways) to keep this proposal unified.
Again, thank you for the feedback -- it's immensely helpful in continuing to shape this proposal.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Time and funding
Let me point out that KDI does not have to fund the entire project. However, if you say you can complete it, you will need to find the time to do so in order to justify the investment.
This is not meant to be a discouragement. Notice that the other recent proposal only asks for partial funding in order to give student scholarships for an existing project.
So getting an infusion of KDI money as incentive to do work you believe in seems fine to me.
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
Along the lines of what I have been thinking
Hello, Ken,
Thanks for the feedback, and I don't see this as a discouragement at all. I have appreciated the feedback from various people on the time estimates, and while it has implications for our costs while doing the work, this is a project we believe in, and want to see built. Toward that end, we're committed to getting this done under the terms we have laid out -- we arrived at these time projections after doing some research, and based on similar development on other projects. While the terrain always shifts during the life of a project, we're comfortable with what we have laid out.
Thanks for the guidance/clarification.
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Publishing/Aggregating
Hi Bill,
I really liked your proposal and I think we share many concepts in common. I agree with you: the publishing/aggregating are complementary pieces of the whole. In fact, I think the publishing/aggregating pieces should be available at all points: from the individual all the way to the organization. Thus, at a university, for example, we would have publishing/aggregating from the individual, the personal social network, the course, the department, the school, all the way to the university. And, of course, among universities, and society as a whole. The key idea is to realize that it all comes from the individual. We should empower individuals to publish/aggregate and share information with their personal social network. I recommend that you read my Master's thesis for some inspiration. I hope it helps! Thanks!
Best regards,
Nick
Hello, Nick, RE: In fact, I
Hello, Nick,
RE:
Fully agreed -- This is something we have been thinking about, and building in various forms for a while -- some of this has been client work, and some has been our own internal R and D. Part of the reason we are documenting the aggregation hub and not creating it as an install profile is that the aggregation hub can be added onto any drupal site to allow for the type of personal publishing/community publishing you describe.
I wrote about this just the other day as part of some thinking I was doing (that is also referenced here) wrt distributed publishing within universities. While my blog post addresses universities, it's equally applicable anywhere.
Thanks for the link to your thesis -- I'll definitely check it out.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Great proposal! Did you
Great proposal! Did you consider adding geo location functionality to the nodes? I think especially with a site that is targeted at a local audience this could be a great feature. Images with information where they were taken attached to them are nothing new but if you know the places the technology becomes more exciting. EveryBlock seems to focus exactly on this (Thanks for the links).
I run a small and regional newspaper site http://zaberbote.de/ it was one of my first drupal projects and I haven't changed much since the start but have been thinking about how the site could be improved allot. Your proposal reaches far into the directory I've been thinking about but misses the geolocation part that I would guess visitors would find very useful, maybe even more useful than SMS functionality.
Another similar question: Do you plan to enable the users to post information about local events? Maybe you wrote about that here and I simply didn't understand it?
Geotagging
Geotagging is something we'll definitely address via the documentation --
There is a lot of work going on with mapping, and several modules doing similar things, and they each have their own positives and negatives. In the interest of keeping an already large project to a manageable size, and in looking forward at an install profile we be able to maintain over time, there is too much flux within the mapping code for us to be able to standardize on one way above all others. We have used Location and Gmap, along with views, in the past, and that has worked for us, but the ongoing work with mapping makes it difficult to choose one solution over others.
With that said, we will definitely address mapping options with documentation, so people who want to add mapping functionality to the site will have a place to start.
RE: "Do you plan to enable the users to post information about local events?" -- this is definitely within the scope of what we will build, and the type of community-driven contribution we want to see flourish.
Feel free to ping back with any additional questions.
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Comments and Community Hubs
One challenge I'm facing on a similar project that integrates aggregation and publishing is comments.
Comments get posted on both the aggregation hub and on the "satellite" blogs. Making comments appear in both places would help authors keep up on reactions to their posts and help readers see the full extent of the conversation.
Any ideas on how to approach this puzzle?
Thanks - I'll be excited to see the project evolve!
~~~
doug worsham
http://lss.wisc.edu/~doug
http://unionblend.uniblogs.org/
Comments are tough
Or, should I say, pulling comments into a site and connecting them to their original post is tough.
Some sites provide rss feeds for comments, and using that functionality it's pretty straightforward to pull in comments, but they are completely separate from the original posts.
While some feeds include info on comments, others don't. This requires more research, but to a certain extent (unless you want to get into screen scraping, which is a whole different set of issues) we are at the mercy of what is contained within the original feed.
These threads also start to discuss this:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/10385
http://drupal.org/node/241935
http://drupal.org/node/216936
Which is all a long way of saying that aggregating comments made on posts is outside the scope of what we are targeting -- if, however, this got solved by someone else as we were building out the site, we'd definitely include the functionality.
Also, if anybody else on the thread has feedback/better info on this, I'd love to hear it.
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Disqus
Disqus is one solution to the commenting mess. It's a distributed commenting service. With some hacking, I'm sure there's a way that you could have the same comments show up wherever the content might travel.
A Drupal disqus module was recently released.
Kyle Mathews
Kyle Mathews
Views in D6 handles
Views in D6 handles comments, and hence RSS feeds for comments. I'd be concerned about using a web service for comments in an install profile - might be tricky to maintain down the line
That could be the starting point
I was doing some work just the other day with Views 2, and I saw that, and I didn't put it together. Thanks for the pointer.
I'll need to look at it some more, and see if/how this addresses the issue of tying the imported comments to the original post. But this has some potential.
RE Disqus -- it looks like a cool service, but I share catch's hesitation with having a key piece of functionality tied to an external service, and a relatively young external service at that.
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Pulling Comments
Some sites provide rss feeds for comments, and using that functionality it's pretty straightforward to pull in comments, but they are completely separate from the original posts.
That's the way to go. You should empower individuals to pull comments from people up to x-degrees apart from them. Initially, an individual sees only comments made to an entry from his personal social network. If he is really interested in this entry, he may decide to see comments from people from up to 3-degrees apart, for example. Of course there should be a way for the system to know beforehand the individual's social graph. I discuss this further in my thesis.
Consensus?
Do people think this is ready to send over for Knight approval?
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
--
http://ken.therickards.com/
additional information
Hello, all,
Please let me know if there is any additional information you'd like, or additional questions in need of clarification.
Thanks,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Hi, A terrific proposal and
Hi,
A terrific proposal and a great discussion! We already have a site in Drupal with these features live at http://www.papyrusclubs.com. The Papyrusclubs is a Free portal where we provide for Schools and Colleges to publish their newspapers online and aggregate the best on the papyrusclubs mother portal. We used Drupal's multi site configuration and Scheduled the aggregation of the most popular content. We are working on improving the publishing and aggregation of content. Currently the Publishing activity unlike the above mentioned concept is linked to an off line activity at the School or College, where we have a Payrusclubs Editorial team. We have workflow associated with the publishing of content. The individual School and College newspapers are published on a monthly basis.
We will look to handle publication from mobile phones by extending the Mailhandler and Mailsave modules to integrate cleanly with Embedded Media fields. and Great proposal! Did you consider adding geo location functionality to the nodes? are some ideas we are looking at as well.
Would definitely be interested in participating in this project!
Cheers,
Shyamala
Netlink Technologies Ltd
http://shyamala-drupal.blogspot.com
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
Congratulations
Congratulations for taking the first hurdle! I wish you guys all the best for the next steps.
Bill, if you need help with aggregation or install profile questions, poke me.
http://www.twitter.com/lxbarth
Thanks!
And we'll definitely be in touch re the aggregation and install profiles -- The work you recently released on the Port module looks really interesting
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Some thoughts....
Bill,
Hope all is well and that your maple syrup is holding up. If you're empty
let me know.
I have been buried in my own project -- ably helped by you -- which has
had some rather remarkable growth and developments. I say this only to
explain why I am so late to commenting on your ambitious proposal. But I
believe that feedback is good -- whenever it comes.
First, congrats on being selected; I wish you best of luck with Knight.
The main thought I had, and you may run into this with the Knight process,
is how you can answer what we used to call in the news business "the nut."
In a story the nut was the graph high in the piece that told the reader
what the heck the point was AND why she/he should keep reading. In a
project proposal, I think, the nut is "What is this thing anyway?" With the
formative questions of: "What does this proposal actually do? What's the
incentive for people to use it? Who wants it? And what is gained by it?"
I don't see the "nut" graphs here. It's almost as though you need to step
back even further and tell me, a 10-year-old, what you want to do and why
it's great.
As you know I'm deep in both areas of what you're talking about. For 33
years I was writing and editing in news organizations. And now I work with
literally thousands of kids and hundreds of teachers trying to get students
to write and write better AND publish their work all over. And I truly
understand the value of Drupal, online writing and your own work.
But, if you have what amounts to a plan for publishing writing, where's
the incentive? Why would people do it, particularly given how the vast
majority of folks don't write well and don't like doing it? What's the
audience? And, from a social networking organization's viewpoint, why would
it want to use this software that you will so ably construct?
I'm sure you have answers for those questions. But I confess to not seeing
them in your proposal. And I think those answers would make your proposal
more compelling for the Knight folks. It may also help as you do your
development. And I also think it will help you gain use of what you end up
with. Again, I'm sorry I am so late in the process; perhaps, too, my
questions are not relevant to these discussions.
Anyway, cool deal. Glad you got the pass through from the folks here
who've devoted so much energy to this project. Again, I hope you get
financial support. I know you work hard, you have great ideas and I'm
confident that what you end up with will, in fact, prove useful.
cheers (and let me know if you need syrup.)
geoff
gggevalt
www.youngwritersproject.org
ggevalt
www.youngwritersproject.org
Hello, Geoff, Thanks for
Hello, Geoff,
Thanks for sharing these thoughts and questions -- some great questions here, and the answers provide the scaffolding for the outreach we'll be doing as part of this project.
RE: "I'm sure you have answers for those questions." -- absolutely. Right now, we're in the middle of getting the proposal into the Knight Foundation. I'll post up some responses over the week.
Thanks for the feedback.
RE: "(and let me know if you need syrup.)" -- you must be a mind reader! We just finished the last batch a few weeks ago. I'm always down for syrup, especially the rich B grade. Liquid gold, that stuff is :)
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Hello, Geoff, I put up some
Hello, Geoff,
I put up some rough notes over on the FunnyMonkey blog: http://funnymonkey.com/knight-drupal-app-update
We're working on our app, and these notes are a part of it -- some of them begin to address the questions you ask here --
In particular, RE:
One of the points of our proposal is that we are seeking to support work people are already doing -- in other words, the point isn't about creating an incentive for people to get their message out, as most orgs already want to get their message out. One of the goals of this proposal is to make it easier for people/orgs to share their ideas; people/orgs shouldn't need to worry about the technology carrying their message -- rather, they should just focus on the message.
Part of the idea behind this proposal cam from us hearing, from a large number of people working in different areas, how they wanted a system that was easy to use. For the specs of this proposal, we attempted to pull the best from what we heard, and make it available in an easily installable platform.
As to convincing people to write, or teaching them how to write more effectively, while technology can be of some use there, that's better solved by person to person communication than a technological intervention. But, with that said, the person to person communication involved in learning how to write more effectively can easily be supported inside the Local Publishing Platform, and shared broadly within the Aggregation Hub.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Just popping in to state
Just popping in to state that this looks really awesome! Keeping fingers crossed that you succeed...
Sam Rose
Social Synergy
Open Source Ecology
P2P Foundation
Sam Rose
Hollymead Capital Partners
P2P Foundation
Social Media Classroom
Thanks --
RE: the "fingers crossed" -- Me too. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't beyond-words excited about this.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Any news on this? :)
Any news on this? :)
Still in conversations.
I'll post here with updates as they come.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Click. Connect. Learn.
Using Drupal in Education
FunnyMonkey
This has been approved!
See http://www.knightblog.org/knight-drupal-initiative-announces-six-winners/
Thanks to all who gave feedback/expressed interest here.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Click. Connect. Learn.
Using Drupal in Education
FunnyMonkey
VoiceBox now available
The code is available at http://code.funnymonkey.com/project/voicebox
The project on drupal.org is at http://drupal.org/project/voicebox
Project documentation is at http://code.funnymonkey.com/doc/voicebox
And, a more detailed anouncement is at http://funnymonkey.com/community-media-grassroots-outreach-voicebox
For those interested, please grab it and run with it. If you have any issues, please report them in the issue queue; this is an alpha release, and while we've done a fair amount of testing we're looking forward to see what other people turn up when this is in the wild.
FunnyMonkey