The Interaction Designers' Association (IxDA) has recently selected Drupal as a base for their website redesign and their Interaction Designers' Network project. In a first step, the new platform will likely comprise local groups, an events calendar, member profiles and improved discussion tools. In short, everything that is available here on groups.drupal.org today (albeit in basic form). :-)
Therefore, any Interaction Designers / IxDA members who would like to get first hand experience of what functionality currently exists in Drupal Groups, feel free to join the group and have a look for yourself.
Anyone new to groups.drupal.org, please do comment on your initial experience here.
For example:
I love to be able to post events to the group calendar, and being able to collaborate on group wiki documents. One thing that really irritates me, though, is the Audience multiselect box. It allows you to post to / spam several groups at once! Personally, I'd remove that "feature" anyday.
To contribute your own experiences, just join this group, or register, if you haven't done so already.
Your personal hands-on experience can guide the future networking platform - and Drupal itself. Both the Drupal community and the IxDA infrastructure initiative will benefit!
Comments
I discovered Drupal's
I discovered Drupal's potential as a website building platform before discovering my skills allowed me to perform as an interaction designer (as well as an user experience designer and information architect.)
Groups and events integration is one option Drupal has to offer.
The time line suggestion that's been recently floated on the ixda discussion list can be implemented with the time line module: http://drupal.org/project/timeline
Its not just the ixda that can benefit, any global non-profit group of professionals (and similar groups) can benefit from a similar open source setup.
Perhaps posting a wish list for the ixda could make it easier for experienced Drupal site builders to offer suggestions on how to implement the wish list. Developers with similar goals sometimes do spare their valuable time to implement suggestions as modules (for features that don't already exist) or UI enhancements that mutually benefit their goals as well.