June TC Drupal Users Group Meeting - Creating online collaborative spaces inside of a Drupal site

Posted by kjantin on April 22, 2011 at 3:52pm

Start:

2011-06-22 19:00 - 21:30 America/Chicago

Organizers:

kjantin

Barry Madore

Event type:

User group meeting

Update: We're moving this topic to the June meeting.

With the release of Open Atrium (built on Drupal) there are new ways to create online collaborative spaces using Drupal. I am interested in bringing together this group of Drupal users to share experiences, challenges and ideas around creating online collaborative spaces on Drupal sites. Let's brainstorm!

I work as the Online Community Builder for the New Tactics in Human Rights website. For years, I have been trying to configure the organic groups module to create a user-friendly collaborative space for our online community of human rights activists. I have never quite figured out the magic recipe. Then, Open Atrium came out. It looks like what I have been wanting to implement by using OG inside of our Drupal site. Now, the New Tactics project is leaning towards implementing a more distributive model for our work with activists around the world and it has brought up this issue of collaborative spaces again.

Can I use Open Atrium to create this New Tactics collaborative spaces? Can I squeeze them into the New Tactics website? Can I take the parts of OA that I like and make it myself inside of my website? I would love to hear about your approaches, experiences, challenges and ideas!

Thanks,
Kristin Antin
www.newtactics.org

Comments

Atrium

Posted by bryan kennedy on April 22, 2011 at 4:18pm

Ohh, I'm psyched about this meetup. We've been using Atrium a bunch here at the Science Museum of Minnesota. We've even developed a custom feature that helps us track all our exhibit components and graphics on projects. Kudos to Gorton Studios for help on that work.

We primarily use Atrium as an internally focused tool, where every page of the site is private. However, we are starting to need certain parts of the site to be public. Do we do it with Groups? Do we make new content types? Can you make part of a Group public? Spaces has some cool features. Is that our savior?

All good questions that we are starting to research. Maybe I'll have some news by the meetup. In the meantime I'd clue you into this post which is pretty technical, but at least might give you a lead on some of your needs.

http://nuvole.org/blog/2010/dec/17/advanced-open-atrium-customization

See ya in May.

making parts of a group Public

Posted by cwgriesel on June 3, 2011 at 4:14pm

At St. Stephen Lutheran in Bloomington, we mix private collaboration with public information by using Organic Groups and Organic Groups Access Control. Groups are set to be public, but posts default to private. Only group members can create posts. And group members can read all posts. However, an administrator can flag posts they like as "public", which then makes the post visible to the entire world.

It works pretty well, but I find it difficult to get people to wrap their head around mixing private and public information in the same group. There seems to be general resistance to the concept. People seem to be more comfortable when they know a group is private and will always stay private, or they know a group is public and will always stay public. Having posts start as private which can later be elevated to public when they are deemed appropriate seems to be a conceptual shift that is hard for some people to make. Maybe people will get used to it over time.

TC Drupalcamp BoF

Posted by cfennell on April 22, 2011 at 4:20pm

@Kristin, besides a good local meetup topic, this also sounds like a great idea for a BoF (Birds of a Feather) meeting at the upcoming TC Drupalcamp - http://2011.tcdrupal.org

Consider Drupal Commons

Posted by Mel55113 on April 27, 2011 at 9:11pm

You might want to take a look at Acquia's Drupal Commons (http://acquia.com/products-services/drupal-commons-social-business-software and http://commons.acquia.com). I've just started working with the latest release, 6.x-1.5, and it looks like it might be a good platform for collaboration.