Drupal as a Catalyst for Community and Change

This piece was written for the February issue of the Drupal Newsletter

Nick Lewis wrote a great post last month about six conditions that lead to the formation of online communities. These conditions were, in short: a meeting place for people who didn't have one, a sense of shared ownership, at least one strong leader, a shared identity, an opportunity for personal gain, and entertaining conversations. While I generally agree with this list, Nick conspicuously leaves out one of the most crucial conditions that leads to the formation of online communities: the technology that the community uses to communicate, organize, and coordinate. While this might seem like a minor oversight, it is, in my eyes, a major one. There is a revolution afoot, and Drupal is one of the vanguards of this movement. But, I sometimes wonder how many of the people who are involved in the Drupal Project fully appreciate the truly awesome role they are playing in this changing world, just as the inventors and early proponents of the printing press probably didn't anticipate that their invention would supplant monarchies and the Church with Democracies, Communism, Socialism, Fascism, etc.

The consequences of new technology can be usefully thought of as first-level, or efficiency, effects and second-level, or social system, effects. The history of previous technologies demonstrates that early in the life of a new technology, people are likely to emphasize the efficiency effects and underestimate or overlook potential social system effects. Advances in networking technologies now make it possible to think of people, as well as databases and processors, as resources on a network.

...These technologies can change how people spend their time and what and who they know and care about. The full range of payoffs, and the dilemmas, will come from how the technologies affect how people can think and work together--the second-level effects" (Sproull and Kiesler, Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization, 1991: 15- 16)  Quoted from John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Cyberwar is Coming!.

Back when the internet was just beginning to emerge, there was a lot of talk about the detrimental effects the internet would have on society. People were going to become less publicly social, less likely to make friends, more likely to spend their freetime in their pajamas, etc., etc. Some psychologists went so far as to come up with a new disorder for those who spent too much time online, Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD), and treatment centers were set up to help "cure" it. But, as so often happens with an emerging technology, most people failed to anticipate the societal level changes that this new technology would bring, which actually seem to have had the opposite effect as the IAD proponents expected. Two interrelated changes that can now be clearly seen are major shifts in the balance of power, espescially in the realm of communication and information control, and the emergence of thousands of communities, both on and offline, where none existed before. Most of the communities that have emerged seem to form around interests and ideology, though there is certainly a geographic aspect to them as well.

I became active in politics through Drupal, and active in Drupal through politics. In 2004 I, like many of my peers, was completely pissed off about the direction of our nation, and I wanted to do something about it. I was involved in the Wes Clark campaign for a while, but when that campaign sputtered to a stop I started to look for another way to get involved. Then, one night at a concert I met some folks from Music for America (MFA), which would have been "Music for Dean", if not for the demise of the Dean campaign, and which, like much of the activities around the Dean movement, was powered by Drupal. I've already written extensively about my experiences with Music for America and the impact that I thought online organizations could have on politics in my Masters Thesis, titled Keys to a Future Majority, so I won't cover it again here. But, one thing has become abundantly clear to me over the past 4 years: Drupal was key in getting me, and likely thousands of other potentially very active individuals, completely invested in the future of our nation. If not for the forums where I first started to chime in on how to make things happen, the many MFA events and ability to volunteer for them, or the permissions which allowed me to take on a bigger role within the organization, I likely wouldn't have become so invested and involved in political/social change.

After the premature demise of MFA, I started to look for other ways to make change, and one of those ways was setting new political Drupal sites. One of these sites, Young Philly Politics, serves as a good example of the effect Drupal can have on an online community. YPP was started on Blogger by my brother , Dan UA, soon after the 2004 election. He set this blog up because there was no place for younger Philadelphians to talk about local politics, and in fact, because of corporate takeovers and downsizing, there wasn't even much local political discussion happening in the local media at all. Through meeting people and word of mouth the site started to grow, and by the summer of 2005 there were 5 or 6 regular contributors, and posts would sometimes get up to 15 or 20 comments. In July of '05 we moved the site to Drupal, partly to give us more options for posting materials (for example, being able to have a teaser and a full post) and partly because of Drupal's unreal SEO capabilities (a discussion for another time). However, what I personally didn't anticipate was how quickly this move would impact the community on, or importance of, the site. On the first day the site went live one of Philadelphia's 17 City Council people wrote a diary, and by the time the last mayoral race came about, less than one year after the switch, the site had become one of the most important political sites in the city, with Mayoral, Council, and other political aspirants duking it out with activists, reporters and editors from the local papers, Philly machine pols, and really just about anyone who had an interest in the races. As of this writing, the site has had almost 4,000 blog posts, about 24,000 comments, and over 2,000 registered users.

Why Drupal?

Obviously, the entire information revolution, and the communities and changes that are born from it, are not progenies of Drupal alone. In fact, the entire "Web 2.0" trend is predicated on people being able to produce content in many different places and share it in many different ways. Communities spring up in different places, at different times, and for different reasons, and they still are going to want to share all sorts of information with others.  Drupal's flexibility and adaptability (as well as the low cost of entry) help it to seamlessly integrate with whatever new technologies emerge. In a sense, Drupal is an online meeting space not just for people, but for technologies as well. It seems that as soon as a new Web 2.0 site or service emerges, some developer comes up with a module which allows for easy integration with a Drupal site.

Second, because Drupal was advanced in the US by a community of activists, and it is maintained by an amazing community of developers, designers, marketers, etc., it is more oriented towards community-oriented sites, which makes it better suited than any other platform to provide the services needed in this networked world.

Third, because of Drupal's technical prowess, it has garnered the attention, and enjoyed the investments, of quite a few large corporations and organizations, who pay developers to perfect and improve upon their code, to the benefit of all. This means that community sites, both big and small, benefit from investments that they themselves could never make.

I am certain that I am leaving out other reasons which contribute Drupal's transformative abilities, but whatever other reasons there are, one thing is clear: Drupal is a catalyst for community and change. And while the fascination with the technical advances and efficiency gains will remain at the forefront of most discussions of the platform, we cannot lose site of the social level changes that Drupal is helping to bring about. The revolution may not be televised, but it is being blogged about, right now, and chances are, that site may be powered by Drupal.