My co-presenter Young Hahn (yh) and I have been very surprised and encouraged by all the positive feedback after our presentation at Drupalcon in Boston. Thank you to everybody who was there and to those who came up to talk to us about the idea.
At Drupalcon we talked about how we've been using a context module internally as a way to map a non-Drupal information architecture onto Drupal. The users of websites we build with Drupal aren't aware of Drupal specific bits like nodes, blocks and modules. They're thinking in terms of what we're calling contexts - things like sections, features and languages. The context system that we're using maps these things onto Drupal's underlying bits and makes it easier to get Drupal to behave and look the way users expect.
It's been interesting to learn how we're not the first folks to talk about this. Gabor pointed us to a post way back in 2003! http://lists.drupal.org/archives/development/2003-11/msg00527.html ...and much more recently there was a patch proposed for Drupal core that is remarkably similar to what we're doing http://drupal.org/node/113382
Next steps for us are to get our basic context module onto drupal.org and start getting direct feedback on it.