Community

ZivTech is extremely excited to announce our participation in the Google Summer of Code 2008. Jody and I, along with Aaron Winborn and Roger Filomeno, are mentoring the project Views as Web Widget, which will be worked on by Utah State University student John Snow. At the end of this project you should be able to turn your Drupal Views output into java, opensocial, and facebook widgets, and your site should be able to serve them out as XML feeds. I believe that this project truly has the potential to push Drupal to another level, as it can allow people to publish from their Drupal site to any number of other sites with ease. As Aaron noted in his post Drupal will Explode your Site into a Million Pieces, and Why You Want That:

Views as a Web Widget has the potential to revolutionize the Internet, now that I think about it. Taking a hint from Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion in The Future is Web Services, Not Web Sites, we are entering a time where creating an API for embedding content within another site is becoming a standard way of sharing information.

The leading players on the web all see the train coming. They are wisely creating APIs and turning themselves into plug-and-play services, not just big destinations. YouTube is just the latest to do so today. Amazon has S3. Google has OpenSocial and an extensive library of APIs. As does Microsoft. Facebook is allowing its applications to live outside the site. Twitter is an API first and (eventually) a business model second. Finally, the booming widget economy shows the promise of small content that can go anywhere.

Anyway, I'll be sure to write more about the project as the summer progresses, but for now I just wanted to end by saying congrats to John Snow, and THANK YOU to google for funding this initiative, and to all the hard working Drupalistas (most of all Webchick) who have helped Drupal to accept 21 awesome students, whose projects promise to bring an amazing amount of new features and functions to Drupal

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!.