To quickly build a sophisticated community site to compete in the DARPA Network Challenge
http://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/
Team DeciNena chose Drupal 6 running on Virtualized Linux.
http://decinena.com
Having used Drupal before for personal and business sites ( http://pocketbacon.com/ ), team leader Chris 'Xenon' Hanson knew that Drupal offered the perfect combination of ease, flexibility and extensibility, "For just about any need, there's already a Module, and you can put almost any custom content together with CCK and Views."
Built in just a matter of days, The DeciNena site feature community registration, forums, social media interaction, geolocation features and forms for reporting sightings of the elusive DARPA balloons. Geo-location and social media are the heart of the DARPA Network Challenge, and Drupal provides ample capability for both. With a $40,000 prize at stake, strong community involvement AND rapid deployment became critical requirements.
Important Drupal Modules forming the backbone of the site include CCK, Location, GMap, Countdown, Mass Contact, Job Queue, Quotes, CAPTCHA/reCAPTCHA, Twitter, Views and Workflow. Location and GMap together help track the hometowns of the Team Members so they can be contacted to investigate rumored sightings and plot the reported sightings. The Sighting submission form was trivial to create incorporating Location and Image Attachments. Drupal's ready-to-use forums and fine-grained access control keep sensitive information compartmentalized and permit discussion of team strategies with trusted organizers.
The Chicago Drupal Meetup Group Zen subtheme was chosen for its clean looks and layout, and city imagery. The theme features a dynamically updating city skyline that reflects the current time of day. Extensive graphic design wasn't a major goal, given the short turnaround time, so simple good looks and immediate usability were key. Customizing the theme to add the Red Balloon iconography was simple, and extra blocks were added to display a running countdown to the contest start as well as a row of ten balloon silhouettes that will fill in as balloons are located.
DeciNena's web site is far more sophisticated and functional than the sites of any of the other competing teams, many of which are simple, one-page affairs. DeciNena is also experimenting with Google Wave to help coordinate organizer operations during "B-Day".
The DeciNena web page is currently deployed on a Xen+Debian/Ubuntu virtual server hosted on an 8-core Xeon machine co-located at Red Rocks Data Center in Morrison, Colorado but the entire site is configured to switch over as needed to a cluster of Amazon Web Services EC2 nodes running on Amazon's East-Coast cloud (also Xen-based). This permits easy and rapid scaling of server capacity in the event of heavy traffic.
Team recruiting is currently ongoing at a rapid pace, and the first team Dry Run will be the morning of Friday Dec 4th. The contest officially starts Saturday Dec 5th at 10AM Eastern time. "This weekend, one team is going to win $40,000. With luck, and Drupal's help, it will be Team DeciNena." said Team Leader Chris 'Xenon' Hanson.
An image to accompany this article is located here:
http://decinena.com/sites/default/files/DeciNenaSite.jpg
