CivicSpace

Here are a few reassuring observations that I'll pass along. There seems to be a lot of buzz building around Drupal. Moby now uses Drupal for his website -- his webmasters have done a great job making it "Not look like Drupal." Dan Gillmor launched his new project Bayosphere on Drupal, and explains why here. There's also OurMedia.org of course.

Here's a list of Drupal sites & CivicSpace sites

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.

The same folks who said that 2004 would be the "Year of the Blog" are saying that 2005 will be the "Year of RSS" (Really Simple Syndication). [UPDATE: This is something I've probably heard at the Berkman Conference on Journalism, but I don't have a citation. Here's one]

RSS basically allows the user to have more control over the content, as Tim Yang demonstrates in his buzzing post 15 things you can do with RSS (it was supposed to be 10, but I got carried away).

I'm in the process of converting this site over to Drupal and then to CivicSpace -- Centralized control over this project has been a big bottleneck, and I should be able to start some parallel processing of tasks as soon as I get it up and running.

Posts will be a bit sparse here since everything will be shifting URLs and whatnot.

I just started really converting the site yesterday, and I'm using my other domain at http://www.echochambermovie.com to get things ported over. There's no graphic design or anything beyond about 4 hours of work.

PRWatch.org is starting to do some more collaborative journalism, such as this discovery of photoshopped propaganda found by a volunteer citizen journalist in Spain.

This pro-Liberation photo is of a US soldier holding an Iraqi child with the added caption of "She's glad he's there. Are you?" This citizen journalist finds another version of the same scene that has a caption that says that the girl is actually a boy, and that his mother had just killed by crossfire.

CivicSpace Lab's Zack Rosen passed along the name of Aldon Hynes, who is setting up a Center for Online Investigative Research, which will also be running on CivicSpace.

Hynes & I talked about our respective projects and similar issues that we are facing such as implementing a set of collaborative tools that are intuitively useful for potential citizen journalists, setting up a centralized/decentralized ecosystem of volunteer labor, establishing a fixed taxonomy vs. having an open folksonomy to organize information, and establishing a reputation system of users and messages.

Within a couple of hours of posting a message to the CivicSpace Community yesterday, a developer from Drupal.org called up and offered to help set up a CivicSpace site for EchoChamberProject.com.

This means that some of the current URL's here will probably be changing. The sooner I switch over, then the easier it'll be.

I'm keeping in contact with this volunteer programmer, and I'll pass along more information as the site gets up and running.

I've been getting up to speed on the latest and greatest web technologies, and one of the most promising finds that I've made so far is with CivicSpace Labs.

When I interviewed PressThink's Jay Rosen last June, he had mentioned that his nephew Zack was an open-source programmer who was working with the Dean Campaign. DeanSpace was the community-building platform built on top of the open-source content management platform of Drupal. DeanSpace has continued development as CivicSpace and has an impressive range of community-building and collaboration tools that should come in real handy for managing a decentralized volunteer labor force.