A student of mine and I started a site (iMechanica.org) in September 2006. The mission of iMechanica is to enhance communications among mechanicians, and to pave a way to evolve all knowledge of mechanics online. It is hosted at Harvard University, and run by volunteers--mechanicians like us. iMechanica allows everyone to read everything without registration. To post anything, you have to register for a free account. By now we have 800+ registered users.
Before deciding on using Drupal, we have also tried Plone, Mediawiki, and Sharepoint 2007. Drupal seems to balance the ease of use and functionality for us. Most people in our community do not like to spend much time online. Few know what HTML is. We use computers mainly to send emails, do word processing, download technical papers. Some of us use computers to do scientific computing.
Mechanics (continuum mechanics, solid mechanics, fluid mechanics) is a basic discipline in engineering science. Tthere might be 100,000 people worldwide whose job descriptions closely relate to mechanics. We hope to engage a fraction of this community.
If you'd like to volunteer to help developing iMechanica, please sign up at our test site iMechLab.
