I've written up a document on choosing a platform for telecentre.org. Telecentre.org is a project of Canada's International Development Research Centre, jointly funded by IDRC and Microsoft, aimed at linking up all the telecentres around the world.
The vision is for a distributed network of web sites that share content via RSS and tags, and we concluded that Drupal is currently the best option for this purpose. But we considered a number of options before making this decision, which I have documented in a short document that is available online or PDF form. It may be useful to others who are working on similar visions of multiple sites that work together to share content and build community.
In the course of working on this project I've met with others who are working on distributed network projects -- but would love to hear from more. If you are working on a distributed network project, please let me know; I'm hoping to organize a community of practice/e-mail list so we can share ideas and strategies.
For more background on telecentre.org see my blog post.
Comments
Also in handbook
Alex was also nice enough to contribute this to the handbook.
The distributed network project concept will likely make heavy use of publish-subscribe and advanced shared user databases. This was one of the items that came up at the Portland DrupalCon.
Samuel, All the best. You
Samuel, All the best. You have chosen the right plaform ( that you can depend on). I would like to know if volunteer contributions are allowed for this porject.
awesome.
Samuel, I and a few others share your vision of a distributed network project. From the perspective of DrupalART, we primarily are thinking of how to have a shared network of artist and musician sites where content can aggregate from site-to-site. That way publishing to one site would essentially be an instant distribution system for an artist's work as it gets distributed across their network automatically.
It is an exciting concept and it seems many share this vision. One of the main concerns is how to establish a common taxonomy system across sites and trust/relationship system between connected sites. I would be very interested to join a community/email list about these topics.
Farsheed
drupalART.org
Brilliant concept!
Hi Alex, Thats exactly the way things should be going. Im totally in agreement with the approach, especially the concept of using RSS and tags as the glue. Im a firm believer in tags, though I feel the current Drupal variety can still be improved its a great start. Someone just asked about the use of Taxonomy in conjunction with this. Im keen to see how you respond, because Im also not sure about the right way to go. But my gut tells me that if the base drupal tagging capability is improved, then diving fully into a tag driven community site would be better than mixing with Taxonomy. Though maybe taxonomy could still be used for very specific purposes. My feeling is that if rss / tag approach was fully utilized then taxonomy isnt really necessary.
In fact if we look at the drupal org site itself, there are definitely elements of communication that could be improved upon. I may miss some of the ins & outs because Im not that long been here, however Im fairly sure, that the time currently required to visit the site and trawl through the various areas to keep up to date with new info/posts and existing conversations is much more than if simple community tags and rss feeds were incorporated to the site. Those who have been here a long time may have already found certain tricks, but its not easy for new users and as a result, also becomes frustrating for people trying to support new users who arent able to find info that is already around.
BTW thats an honest suggestion for the Drupal.org site, and Im happy to talk with others if they are interested in doing something like that for the site. It will be an example for all sites on applying good RSS/tag practices to a community site.
Some of the areas where tags are currently help back in drupal are the inability to browse them well. ie searching for a combination of tags, say "forum & distributed & websites" to hone in on specific content, without having to force people to tag combined words. eg distributed_websites. Also the ability to browse the tags in a facetted manner. eg search "distributed" and then see the related tags (yes we do have that simple option currently) but then to be able to dig down further levels of tag intersections and so on. Such an approach is a nice combo of search & browse. del.icio.us director is a great example of such a search in an AJAX style interface. But even del.icio.us standard interface to browse a persons tags is sufficient. If you are truly planning to have a distributed network of sites running with rss/tags as the info glue (info router) then I feel this kind of tag search will be very important. Certainly the current simple idea of a tagadelic display and 1 level of related tags is far too basic.
A good example of tag usage on a site is www.advancinginsights.com. My own site is still in construction mode but you are welcome to visit and comment. (see stratagility.com) - though Im still struggling with getting groups to work without disrupting other permission settings/access that I wanted. Which raises one more point. Are you also looking to use group functionality to any heavy degree? And if so what do you see as the way to get distributed groups working across distributed sites? could someone be a memebr of a group on 2 different sites and could a group be distributed across sites?
Finally your aims are wonderful, and in fact I have been putting together plans for a project in Eastern Indonesia to leverage many of these kinds of things. Seeing that you folks really have your stuff together, whats the chances for working on something with telecenter.org for Indonesia, it sounds like its actually designed to avoid the need for someone like me just going ahead and building an independent falovoured community out here. Please do send me more information about your project and how it may apply to a community effort say in Eastern Indonesia.
All the best, Regards, Mark
tracker
For recent posts use tracker. One choice is also found on tracker and that is any thread you have commented on.
http://drupal.org/tracker
I have no idea why you think it would be easier if everyone could 'tag' everything. I think it would be complete choas and you would never find anything. As it is, folksonomy has made it into core for 4.7.
-sp
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Test sites and good habits: Drupal Best Practices Guide.
Misc Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
yes tracker helps
OK, Thanks steven, yes thats how Ive been doing it.
Rss would prevent us from having to visit the site to check latest updates. But I didnt see the rss feed for tracker, (maybe Im not looking in right place). That would make keeping track of any specific areas people were interested in much easier.
I know making a comment means that it can be easier to track and follow through the "My recent" track list. But again, it still means visiting the site.
I hope I didnt come across as negative. I love drupal, drupal org, the people, everything. Drupal.org is definitely a great community site, im just noting ways that this may be possible to improve upon for everyones experience. Such improvements would not be about making it catchup with others , but rather break further ahead and demonstrate the amazing capabilities that can be exploited through Drupal.
RSS would definitely help. Boris mentioned that the RSS is throughout the site, but till now I didnt realize it was available on these parts, so I need to recheck a lot of this.
The point on Tags. Well yes potentially it could be chaotic, but I feel a lot depends on how you manage it. I know letting go of a more controlled approach for the chaos of tags could appear quite frightening. However there are more and more examples appearing of effective use of tags for managing information. Nature publishing group is one example, and Infoworld is another. If you have a chance I think its well worth reading these two following articles.
1 is a more academic look at classification, ontologies and folksonomies by Clay Shirkey.
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/06/03.html
The other is a practical assessment of Infoworld's use of tags by Jon Udell.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
My self I see many strategies for managing the "chaos". in fact by combining tagging of content with rss aggregators & rss feeds that can be pointed to from drupals menus/blocks you can really go a long way towards very dynamic/adaptive but still well managed content. However I do agree that to be really effective the methods one can utilize for searching/browsing of the tags and the management of those tags needs to be extremely good.
Possibly the practices that Connotea (Nature Publishing Groups tag system) are developing for their community of scientists/journalists/authors/readers may show us the way.
Drupal seems well poised to be the perfect environment to deploy such tag strategies to improve the information flow among communities just like Infoworld and nature publishing have started doing.
negative-positive
negative-positive, we're having a conversation.
You can use the sage plugin for firefox to find a lot of the feeds. Try this one http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/14/0
Drupal is not about catching up with others, never really has been. :) so don;t worry about it. Just concentrate on features you would like to see/exploit and get code in or get testing and commenting of others code in.
I'll read the articles later. As to control and frightening.... I was thinking that the choas would be more along the lines of extremely irritating and make things more difficult to find for supporting people.
We already have a lot of new people that can't be bothered to spend a day or two familerizing themself with drupal.org posting questions in strange places, allowing free tagging for such posts would just pollute and render useless finding anything on the site.
-sp
---------
Test sites and good habits: Drupal Best Practices Guide.
Misc Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
It doesn't look like the
It doesn't look like the tracker does have an RSS feed. According to http://drupal.org/node/7474 at least. It is a good idea though!
It would also be nice to have a 'track this' link on each page which would add the page to your tracker so you could see when it is updated without having to submit a comment.
Taxonomy can actually be
Taxonomy can actually be used to do tagging -- 4.7 includes native support for free tagging, and there is a patch to add free tagging to 4.6 (the current version). And, of course, you can have multiple vocabularies that are free tagging enabled, leading to the interesting concept of non-overlapping tagspaces. Each tag (since it's a taxonomy term) automatically generates an RSS feed.
This news/blog analysis site for tags was pointed out to me. I think advancing tagadelic to add some of these features would be interesting.
Also, RSS feeds are everywhere on Drupal.org: every forum has it's own RSS feed, as do all the categories in the project section. Static handbook pages are the only areas without RSS feeds. Now if only the mailing list and newsletter had RSS, I would be happy.
There are many things in the works for Drupal.org to make improvements...but also never enough people. Please join the Drupal-Docs and Infrastructure teams if you want to help out.
Hi Boris, Im not a developer
Hi Boris, Im not a developer but If i can be of value Im happy to contribute, just let me know. My self am keen on the tagg/blog aspects for building participatory communities, currently probably the best way I can contribute is to explore and demonstrate how the principles can be applied in drupal - or where they dont apply. I'd be happy to be of help in the tag / folksonomy module
The tagging interface question is interesting and important. Currently, tagging, even as I understand it will be in v4.7 is only serachable to 1 level of relatedness. I think this is a key constraint for tags in drupal. So yes Stevens point is quite fair because managing/searching tags is fairly ineffective as an information management tool. Tagadelic and other ways of looking at the data are fine as improvements for the look of things, but dont improve manageability of the actual info.
I think that either something simple like del.icio.us own interface, which lets people explore to several depths of tag intersections or the Ajax interface for delicious (Delicious Director) by Johnvey Hwang are good examples and something similar would advance drupals value for tagging tremendously.
http://johnvey.com/features/deliciousdirector/
My own drupal site that am still constructing is exploring the use of tags to manage the info. Its not yet properly formed but you can get an idea of how I am planning to use tags/rss for info management by going to the following page:
http://www.stratagility.com/og
and looking at the block on the right hand side called "tools & Resources"
This is a menu that points to the feeds of tags for those areas. It allows a very dynamically updated pointer to key resources as discovered and determined by the end users themselves. Currently I dont have a community of users so the feeds are not really containing anything as yet but the principle is jsut that, its actually very simple.
Everyone welcome
Everyone is welcome. I specifically pointed to the Documentation and Infrastructure teams as there are lots of tasks there for non-developers. I'm not a developer either, and neither is sepeck -- we just spend a lot of time helping in various non-code ways. You'll just have to dive in and figure out where you can help.
Tags: there are an unlimited number of features that can be added. If you are passionate about seeing them coded up, the best thing to do is write a very concrete description of how you see things working, ideally with actual screen designs as well. The next step is to promote the idea and try and get funding so that a developer will code it. You can use the project and feature request system to add ideas to any part of Drupal.
Drupal's taxonomy system is highly flexible, and it has the base capability to do many things. The fact that such interfaces don't exist today just mean they haven't been developed yet. Alternative systems like awtags may also be useful (folksonomy hasn't had any changes in quite some time, I don't know if it will be further developed because of Drupal's core abilities in the area).
And I actually hacked in a feed for the tracker that worked OK several versions ago. Here is the outstanding feature request --
http://drupal.org/node/7474
-- you can put your notes on how you would like it to work. Notice that it has been around for quite some time -- unless there is someone interested in building it, it won't get done.
Anyway, hope this has been a good intro to open source for you. Hope to see you around.