Killer CivicSpace Apps on the Horizon

I attended a CivicSpace User Summit in NYC after the Personal Democracy Forum, and there were a couple of really exciting expansions to the Drupal/CivicSpace platform coming down the pipe.

The first was OpenNetwork.TV that CivicActions was contracted to do. OpenNetwork.TV is still password protected, but we got a sneak peak at the user summit. WOW! It's going to take what's possible with Drupal/CivicSpace to the next level.

UPDATE: CivicSpace Labs is not responsible for the development of the Drupal modules for OpenNetwork.tv. CivicActions' Aaron Pava merely gave us a demo of OpenNetwork.tv at the CivicSpace User Summit.

Ken Jordan is heading up a coalition of progressive groups to use a BitTorrent back-end to deliver video from a group blog. Alternet's Deanna Zandt posted some planning meeting notes on her New Technology Landscape blog. From conversations I had at PDF with those in the know and her blog, it looks like the following groups will may be somehow involved:

* ACORN
* Afro-Netizen
* AlterNet
* Center for Civic Participation
* Center for Digital Democracy
* MoveOn
* National Coalition On Black Civic Participation
* Personal Democracy Forum
* Progressive Civic Fund
* SEIU
* Sojourners

That's quite a coalition.

UPDATE: Alternet's Deanna Zandt left a clarifying note in the comments section that these groups were merely a product of a brainstorming session and not a fixed coalition.

The groups listed above (which were links from my blog) are not necessarily involved groups... they are groups people mentioned in various discussions at the New Tech Landscape meetings. As in, off the top of our heads. :-)

I believe that there are some in Deanna's list that will be a part of the final coalition, but I wrongly assumed that these groups were more formally involved in the OpenNetwork.TV project.

Another great reason to start adopting CivicSpace/Drupal is that CivicActions is making all of these modules open to the Drupal community. Henri Poole tries not to do any development unless it's open sourced for everyone because it helps drive rapid evolution. Sweet.

Another killer app on the horizon is CiviCRM -- CRM standing for Customer Relationship Manager. This will be a database webapp that will provide a way for an administrator to control contact lists. But CiviCRM also gives the user control over their own personal information with the web interface. It also gives the user the choice for how much info to make public vs. private as well. Here's the link to the CiviCRM demo -- login with a username/password of demo/demo.

CiviCRM will be very useful for managing all of the contacts that I've been making. I'm not sure how much interface is going to be happening direct e-mail lists, but I imagine it'll happen one way or another.

Jo Lee of CitizenSpeak.org is using fundable.com to raise money to pay for porting her e-mail advocacy toolkit into CivicSpace. It'll be interesting to see if Lee is able to fund her development through a number of small donations -- if she doesn't receive her target amount, then all of the dedicated contributors get a refund. Apparently, fundable isn't even taking a fee yet. If this works out, then a new method for funding open source functionality could prove to be viable.

I also just talked briefly with Eric Gundersen of DevelopmentSeed.org. They did some custom javascript / CSS coding for the a number of screencasts to teach users how to use different aspects of the CivicSpace website from a user's perspective. This type of thing is going to be very useful to explain how to use CivicSpace for the early & late majority -- The pioneers and early adopters won't have a problem figuring it out, but the other non-technical users can definitely use these types of short introductions.

Gundersen also pointed me towards a module that CivicActions is working that can be thought of as the "Yahoo Groups Killer." CivicGroups is a Drupal plug-in that should really help people self-organize and manage e-mail lists of like-minded folks. Now that Meetup is starting to charge for their services, then this could provide some competition as a free workaround.

Finally, DevelopmentSeed's Bonnie Bogle points to a case study of why the business units at Yahoo chose to go with Drupal's Content Management System -- "because of its breadth of capabilities, powerful taxonomy, and extensibility."

The primary decision was whether to build versus buy. We looked into a few commercial applications, but the upfront costs and the inability to modify them easily as our needs change discouraged us from going that route. Because we had a server for the design group and some technical know-how, we decided that open-source would be the best for us.

Drupal's flexibility and extensibility was also very attractive to me when I was deciding what to base this site on. The price was just right. Now I just need to look more into the different themes in order to make the site look half-way decent.