UPDATE: The paper work is now submitted to knight! Thank you everyone for your great comments and feedback, as soon as we hear back on a time frame from Knight we will notify everyone!
Officially, this proposal was sent outside of the KDI, as discussed at the September 2008 review meeting -- agentrickard
We've had some great conversations with José Zamora at Knight about open sourcing some of the products we've been working on and about the positive externalities these project have already had for Drupal and that they could have as the modules are expanded and demand continues to grow. Jose would like to get a sense from the community on how valuable modules like context_ui, spaces, messaging and notifications, feedAPI and mapnik maps are. He would also like to know if other shops could benefit from having 8trees (our intranet package) and Managing News (http://managingnews.com/). So we wanted to share with you the three proposals that we have sent to Jose and the Knight team that they would like us to submit all as one package.
Open sourcing Managing News Proposal: Messaging and Notifications and FeedAPI
http://s3.amazonaws.com/developmentseed/knight/knight_managing_news.pdf
Releasing 8Trees Intranet Package Proposal: Context_UI and Spaces
http://s3.amazonaws.com/developmentseed/knight/knight_intranet.pdf
Building a new mapping solution: Mapnik for Drupal
http://s3.amazonaws.com/developmentseed/knight/knight_mapping.pdf
If you would like to make this happen, post a comment :) Our take on the concept Knight is pursuing with the KDI is simply that good tools come out of good projects and good projects need good tools. This cyclical scenario has led to much of Drupal's current growth, just like with all other successful open source communities. We are excited to get started and hear what you think!
What makes all three of these proposals very different from anything else proposed before for both the Knight Drupal Initiative and for the Knight News Challenge is that Development Seed is not starting from scratch or adding new products to its lines of business. A primary function of our company to date has been in developing these products for clients, and more than 10,000 hours of collective development work has already gone into these products – including nearly 4,000 hours into Managing News and FeedAPI since we first applied for the News Challenge.
This kind of “research and development” is generally prohibitively expensive for someone trying to apply for a grant to 1. build an amazing tool while at the same time 2. giving back to the community (which creates considerable additional expense that can sometimes be hard to gauge). For Development Seed, much of this work has been done for paying clients and has thus been subsidized all along.
See each PDF
See each PDF
See each PDF
Comments
Hell yeah. All of those
Hell yeah. All of those would be terrific gifts for the community and I think the community will expand upon those packages in interesting ways.
This would rock
Next to the technical contributions that would flow to the Drupal community, I can imagine a lot of organisations (development shops, but also ngo's and non profits) benefiting from a solution like 8Trees (not to mention MN and the modules that you would be releasing). Getting a professional-level project managment tool at a reasonable price is (in my experience at least) not easy: this could help a great deal in solving that problem. Really cool stuff.
Woow.. This is SOOOO great
I could think of a kazillion projects where we could benefit from an 8trees as an intranet/project management tool.
Clients would even pay cash for it.
Open sourcing it makes it even more interesting!
This means we can actually help improving the tool and that we will have a vast pool of community members.
And i bet other companies and NGO's have the same feeling.
This news really made my day. No, this news alone even made the DrupalCon a success for me.
Belgian Drupal User Group lover - http://drupal.be
Belgian Drupal User Group lover - http://drupal.be
+1 for more mapping options
+1 for more mapping options in Drupal. Being able to integrate Mapnik generated maps as one more layer of an Open Layers would be very powerful.
Good on ya mate
context_ui, spaces, messaging and notifications, feedAPI, mapnik, 8trees and Managing News reads like a who's who of amazing tech.
We work with science groups in Australia developing knowledge management and science communication systems. Climate change is a key focus of our clients and these technologies would be an incredible benefit to the work they do.
Very valuable projects
My vote is in.
Drew Gorton
Gorton Studios
Wonderfull
I saw a quick demo of context this afternoon and it would make my life MUCH easier. So +1*n from me!
Vote++!
Let's create some real cool intranet kittens! Great work, would love to see these solutions available and have the community embrace it
Wow.
This is amazing.
My vote's in, at a 5.
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
Yes, and a request
Would be terrific to have these apps open-sourced. They are terrific applications, and will be even better with more eyes on them.
The more than quarter-million price tag (281k, if I'm adding correctly) sounds like a big investment though, for apps that are already mostly built.
I wonder if
http://groups.drupal.org/knight-drupal-initiative
could have a new field added, including the total grant request, as a column?
Might help add some perspective to all of the proposals.
These products are
These products are undeniably awesome and I join the chorus of praise for them. However, I would also like to see some more details about where the funding is going, and I feel this should be out in the open rather than having to email for details.
funding past work?
I agree with mroswel, most of these apps are already built, so is this primarily funding for past work? afaik KDI applications are conducted entirely on here, so it shouldn't be an issue getting budget details.
The fact that a lot of this
The fact that a lot of this technology has been started already is actually crucial to our proposal – it wouldn't be possible to do this from scratch on the budget we're proposing, not by a long shot. We're looking for funding to bring this technology to the community.
These 3 projects as they exist each represent loosely joined components: they can work together, but require significant work and expertise to set up each time in each slightly different case. The goal of these proposals is to make from each of these an application that can be installed as easily as a basic Drupal blog. The 8 Trees and Managing News projects both need extensive work done to make installation and usage easier. Neither is as simple to setup as just hitting install.php. But they should be. :)
Many of the components of 8 Trees and MN, particularly the notification system, have only ever been tested in a 'works for me' way. Our goal is to bring these to release quality and work to have them included in the appropriate modules on DO.
Our proposal to build a Mapnik based mapping solution for Drupal has the highest percentage of entirely new work. The limited work we've done with Mapnik is custom and unique every time. We're looking here to build a developer-extensible and non-developer-usable way to both setup Mapnik (itself a difficult task) and have quick ways to start using it - most likely Views plugins.
This proposal is about taking ideas and work that will probably not otherwise make it into the Drupal community and making that happen. That is, getting these useful tools into our community, and making them sustainable and supportable.
Cheers,
Final touches
I agree with Jeff. The finals touches are crucial and demanding. And these include integration, packaging and documentation. If the remaining tasks and estimated cost could be published, this would be great.
Budget Proposal
Hi Nick,
We're on the same page. These numbers we shared were to give a ballpark to the community. Obviously the details are part of what Knight requires too. :) We're drafting more detailed proposals already and will get those up here as soon as we have them ready, probably next week.
Cheers,
Ian
Text on 3 PDFs informed me very good!
Good goal! Success with your challenges!
I would like to see this happen :-)
Managing News: I've been keeping an eye on the Managing News project since the early start, and I am very impressed by what it offers.
I even tried to mimic its functionality by building something similar myself, using the standard Drupal modules (thanks to the improvements that the DevSeed team already made for these modules - especially the FeedAPI and notifications).
Open sourcing the whole package would mean a huge leap forward for both the small organizations that would benefit from these tools to keep an eye on what the world is saying, and for the Drupal community that would be able to build upon these new features.
If you would add an installation profile, as proposed, it would lower the barrier massively for those who want to install the tool but have limited technical drupal knowledge. That would be great !
8trees intranet package: the context_ui and spaces are kind of new concepts that are currently not very well catered for in Drupal, but are very important when working on intranet applications. It would be great to see them developed some more so they would be easier to implement in drupal projects.
The technical solution that's currently used for context_ui (based on the urls) might need to be reconsidered, as is mentioned on the project page.
As soon as the 8trees intranet package is open sourced, drupal shops and other organizations will benefit from this application, and a lot of improvements will be made available by all people using it.
Managing News
I think the Managing News is the most interesting! Great job!
I agree. The three projects
I agree. The three projects would be a great addition to the Drupal community. Since all three applications are in current use, it would be great to understand what more development would have to be done.
Yes
All of these components are framework pieces that provide super valuable building blocks that "raise the bar" for base functionality: what cool new functionality could be built on top of them? A ton :P
Two areas that I would love to see focused on are.
1. The ability for a site that runs some of these things to provide services to other "downstream" websites -- either through plugins (code) or widgets
2. The ability for sites to federate
Those comments might be out of scope, I guess I've just been thinking about ways that components can leverage the installed base of Drupal sites / enable network effects of information and functionality for each new site that comes online.
Bottom line, if KDI can "bounty" the work that you've done to bring it available into the community, I hugely support this.
Yes, and...
Each of these components present usability, community, informational and social networking "leg-ups" for a lot of groups, feed and panels work. Substantial leg-ups, or legs-up... Unquestionably contributes to the mix.
That said, I think integration — in terms of current methodology — will require a significant amount of follow through and informational leadership to enable the community to absorb these significant contributions.
For example, spaces and context UI alone are shifts not only in "framework" but in the way we currently "think" about constructing sophisticated groups/panels relationships. Tangentially, I've been working with Sam Boyer on a Global Justice site design and have witnessed him pull off some remarkable things that in the face of integrating these elements may not have happened... We "talked" about Spaces early on.
I totally applaud this suggestion and contribution. I just think a lot of knowledge transfer must occur if this rich work is indeed open sourced. It will help meld current methodology and framework thinking.
Great point
This is a great point Patrick -- for a 2 or 3 month period this winter Jeff Miccolis and I were convinced we were mildly crazy for taking the approach we were with context and spaces.
There is not only a lot of work to be done to get these modules rock solid and stable for a Drupal 5/6 release -- there is also a lot of documentation, communication, demonstration and back-and-forth to be done with the Drupal community to understand where our current concepts and their implementations could better help other projects.
Would it have been easier
Would it have been easier for these 3 proposals to be 3 separate proposals in 3 separate posts? Should we encourage proposals to use the form only? And only one proposal per form? And avoid PDFs as much as possible?
My response: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
It just means less downloading and easier to get the info.
Cheers Daniel
Agree
I would actually agree with those responses. This one is a little different because Development Seed has been having ongoing discussions with Knight since the News Challenge ended last year.
However, I think we need some rationale for why these are together. And pdfs should be supplementary, not replacements for providing the info.
/end procedural rant
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http://ken.therickards.com/
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http://ken.therickards.com/
Hi Ken & Daniel, Good
Hi Ken & Daniel,
Good questions, and we agree that they are three separate things. That said, Ken's hunch was right. We had been talking with José at Knight and he suggested that we submit these all together and that we share the PDF's we'd already drafted. We know this isn't the normal format. We know that it would be easier to keep lots of these exciting comments more focused if they were on their own thread, but hopefully the overlap in ideas proves to be helpful here too.
Cheers,
Ian
Changes
Ian-
I think the proposal above needs, at the least, the funding parts taken from the PDFs and incorporated into the main text, as requested, so we don't have to dig too much.
I also suspect that we will need to split these into three projects for review. Personally, I'm not comfortable just throwing the three projects together, even with respect to ongoing conversations with Knight.
I would propose that we split this into 3 applications for KDI -- or is it 4, with the intranet. Then, if all the projects move forward, we let Knight collapse the grant handling.
[edit after further review] -- I count no fewer than 7 different projects in the title alone. This really needs to be broken apart before we vote on it. Plus, FeedAPI already received Google funding this year as part of Summer of Code, so I have some issues with including that here.
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http://ken.therickards.com/
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http://ken.therickards.com/
3
These are 3 complex applications. I think they should not be separated further than 3 proposals. As I understand: 1 application package = 1 install profile, 1 theme and bunch of modules..
I hope I can see them in our download section really soon..
In reply: @pasquallle: We're
In reply:
@pasquallle: We're in full agreement here. These are three things for very definitive reasons.
@Ken: Please see my post above to Nick: http://groups.drupal.org/node/14388#comment-49253. We're working on more detailed proposals. :)
Cheers,
Ian
Delay?
Does that mean we are removing this proposal from consideration and replacing it with new ones?
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http://ken.therickards.com/
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http://ken.therickards.com/
Hi Ken, No, we don't think
Hi Ken,
No, we don't think we should remove it from consideration. Talking about it on IRC today will be great. With all the great votes and comments here, it's clear all three of these projects are on the right track and this is just an issue of process. Looking forward to IRC.
Cheers,
Ian
Mapnik proposal questions...
I'm really keen on getting a Mapnik solution to Drupal. When I saw this at Drupalcon I was impressed but being critical (that's what Ken asked for)...
From your PDF: "Building a new location storage solution for Drupal that tightly integrates with taxonomy handling to allow for easy geotagging"
How does what you are suggesting interact with other geo-spacial efforts (for instance the Geo module). I really encourage the building of APIs and then refactoring current modules already in existence to incorporate across the board standardization. This way we can make all modules more useful and harmonize efforts rather than have modules clashing (?) against each other. And make it easier for end-users to know which modules to use.
So, please explain how you will help mapping, as a whole, within Drupal rather than building a standalone module?
By the way, I'd be quite happy if you upped the budget to include a broader strategy.
Cheers Daniel
Hi Daniel, In Szeged we had
Hi Daniel,
In Szeged we had some a good talk with Allie Micka about the work that has been happening very recently on the Geo module and are very excited about it. Resource allocation wise this looks like it may allows us to allocate more time to visual map generation, plug ability, and documentation.
The big aim of the mapping work is to provide a access to a broader range of map generation with support for existing Drupal modules (like location and geo) using open standards (like KML and WMS) with a focus on mapnik, as it's OSS, flexible, standards compliant and makes very beautiful maps.
+1 for mapping
Integrating Mapnik with Drupal would be a huge benefit to the public sector.
-Glenn
+1 8trees
I would use and contribute to 8-trees. Especially in the area of Instant Messaging integration, I really want to see that feature.
Split votes
The two comments above (#47932) and (#48154) reinforce the idea that we need to separate these proposals.
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http://ken.therickards.com/
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http://ken.therickards.com/
All three sound like
All three sound like promising proposals, but I'd like to see/read more details as they become available.
+1 to separate threads.
Bravo
Well done,
I hope to see all 3 fully funded.
I LOVE messaging+notifications+mail2web !!!!
Thanks!
ryan.
http://thefractal.org
Like Christmas
Giving these megaprojects to the Drupalverse would be like an early Christmas, be it together or separate!
ooo i was looking at
ooo
i was looking at proposals and giving stars, but just saw a mention that we should be leaving comments as well as my 5 stars.
these packages look really great, and would really raise the bar for module development.
i see you're proposing one install profile... however... is it also possible to have items stand-alone? i would love a robust and stable messaging system... but then might not need the maps for a certain project; or i might want mapping, but not want the intranet.
reading the comments- which appear out of chronology, i can't tell where you are on this particular issue?
+1
I would like to see 8 trees going open source. Cool.
news?
any news on this proposal?
Open sourcing News
open sourcing Managing News Proposal is great and appreciated, when it goes true.
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