I think it's time for a summary of Transitiony Drupal initiatives.[Cross posted to Transition Drupal group]
Forgive me some of what I say will not be accurate, but my attempt here is to give a big picture.
First of all the 'official' initiative made some progress this weekend in separating 2 use-cases1) The transition groups themselves2) The local communities in which transition groups operate
Paul and Henri have been working on this for some time and Henri's company, http://communitytools.info has been working towards it with http://demo.selts.eu/ (seems offline right now). This site is properly built and maintained (it is in Drupal7 and has an installation profile), it has groups at it's core, maps everywhere and is mobile friendly. It's not being heavily used, and it is looking to Transition Towns for adoption and to some extent direction. The Transition Towns are generally not techno-appreciative, and are not able to work together to agree on, or provide resources for, their software needs.
Second there is the Community Forge distro, which was founded as a way for my Community Accounting module to be provided to LETS groups. This is properly built, and at least 40 groups depend on it. It's not a whole community solution, but emphasises exchange and accounting. It also supports the governance structure of these membership groups. Features include, marketplace, photos, easy printing, accounting, community blog, events calendar and a number of subtle functionalities. It will shortly be available in Drupal 7, and I've tried to make all the components as modular and re-usable as possible. While this distro is ready and available for hundreds of LETS groups accross the world, its not very suitable for communities with a broader intention than just exchange. This whole project is a burden to me because I want to concentrate on accounting, and on other kinds of community currency initiatives, like Collaboraction, Hackney Shares, People's pound, Transition Lancaster, Sunmoney, CES, Apres Geneve, OpenWorldVillages to name but a few.
Finally I just heard of Arie's project today, (English preview) although he was at the conference this weekend. Arie is funding professional developers to build a feature-rich community site. So far it has one installation, is in drupal 6, but for Drupal 7 there will be a proper installation profile (although that seems like a large job) and it will have some powerful configuration options. To me it looks like ning but with much stronger intention than sharing links and chatting. Suitable for transition towns, ecovillage network, global villages etc
Also consider that Timebanks UK is deciding whether to extend Community Weaver II built by Timebanks USA in Drupal 6 or to make something new in Drupal 7. They have a realistic amount of money to do this, but lack project management skills, I understand.
So I would like to add it all up and see what we have.
NeedsA load of transition towns that need but don't understand software (thousands of users)A load of timebanks that have money and clear needs, but no process.
A very large group LETS-like communities with aging software and no roadmap (CES)Many individual groups that have clear needs, and process, but no money.
ResourcesA D7 'civic' distribution from a passionate group in Estonia but receiving no clear direction or demand from Transition (Ctools)
A D7 'LETS/timebanks' distribution with users and direction but no developer (me)A D6 holistic distribution with very clear intention, and a demand, and resources, but somewhat behind in the development curve.
Outside FundingTimebanks UK has a proper budget to build a drupal distro and support development, but they are not engaging with the wider conversation.NESTA has a specific pot of money for exchange but they are failing to empower the most promising initiatives IMHO
None of NEF's £5.5M is earmarked for drupal projects or drupal software development.Transition Towns doesn't raise money as easily as I would have imagined, and don't have an appetite for it.There might be enough interest to do crowdfunding if we could identify a project to serve TN, CES, Cforge, GEN and/or Timebanks networks
Rudolf Steiner Social Finance seem only interested in projects local to USASpice have a working model where they 'sell' timebank solutions to enlightened local governments in Wales. They are creating their own walled garden, and have not responded to my request for dialogue.
For me it's very difficult to see how these three drupal projects can merge, share code or resources. Although in all I do I work towards modularity and reusability, which is why my progress is so slow. Its possible to write migration scripts to take the important data between drupal distributions. Many of the independent projects I'm talking to have very similar requirements. I could build sites for them pretty quickly but if I went around doing that I would quickly clog up my whole future upgrading and improving them.
So what might a collaboration look like? Here's what I offer - to everyone
- When I've got Cforge for Drupal 7 done, I will help put Accounting in Likeabee and Ctools
Comments
thanks for compiling, plus another
Hi Matt,
Thanks for compiling this list. If okay, I'd like to add a reference to Build For the World, a project I've been working on as part of the Time For the World timebanking dissemination project. It's oriented a bit differently than some of the other things on this list (or the one's I'm familiar with like Community Forge and Community Tools).
BuildFTW is oriented around documenting and sharing information and assets (files, mostly) created through community projects. It's intended as a sort of open-notebook approach to help us learn from each other while testing and developing ideas. It doesn't have any formal accounting mechanism in it right now, but part of the longer term idea for the project is to be able to build up community asset maps based around contribution to projects.
For the record, I consider it to be in alpha right now, and I work on it as I have time in my grad work, but it is open and usable right now. It's just that not all the elements are as pretty as I'd like.
Best.
Marc
Marc
buildFTW.org
timeFTW.org
Presenting GEN Sites again
Hello
First of all I also want to thank for that compilation which is very interesting for me.
As I posted here 6 weeks ago, we are also working on a project dedicated to sustainable settlements, ecovillages, transition towns and educative projects.
For the moment the project name is 'GEN Sites' (GEN = Global Ecovillage Network) and is emerging out of a colaboration between RIE (Iberian Ecovillage Network), CASA (American Councel of Sustainable Settlements) and GEN.
It is done in Drupal 7. A detailed description is to be found here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/245748
The prototype for RIE will hopefully be launched in two weeks. The launch of the complete first version for RIE and CASA is scheduled for November / December. It will represent about 20 national networks and up to hundreds of settlements and caravans in the beginning. An adaptation for the continents of Africa, Europe,and others is discussed. The project is designed for integrating different networks and initiatives.
Additional tools like a timebank and a project-travel-organisator will be added in 2013.
GEN is generally offering collaboration to Transition Towns, while CASA is especially aiming to also represent the latinamerican Transition Towns movement in their site.
I'm very open and interested in collaboration and interchange of resources.
Regards
Achim
Great summary – thanks for compiling this
Matslats,
Thank you so much for putting together this detailed summary of where things have got to. Sounds like it was an interesting discussion at the TN Conference last weekend. I wish I'd been there.
Having read your summary again this morning, I was wondering if you could clarify one of the first points you make on the two use cases discussed by the "official" initiative (by which I assume you mean this Drupal group?)
Are you suggesting that a conclusion was reached that there are actually two projects:
Or are you just suggesting there are two use cases for one site to fulfil?
If so that raises some interesting questions...
can't clarify
I wasn't in the meeting, hopefully Henri, Paul, or Ed will clarify. It was just the identification of the use cases that was acknowledged, which I think is critical to acknowledge given how much work has been done so far.
To update on the Transition
To update on the Transition side, I've been working with a couple of potential TI groups who are interested in adopting a new site. We've done some requirements analysis and fed that back to CommunityTools. When CT deliver those requested improvements we hope to move to the next phase of prototyping a site for one of the groups.
We did discuss sites for groups v communities. Its certainly my personal feeling that a distinction between these makes sense. Adding exchange tools (or any number of other more complex features) into a Transition site is not likely to get extensively used given current experience. At the recent Transition REconomy day, one very interesting talk was about a project analysing the economic benefit of local businesses to Totnes. This was inspiring partly because they had a whole group of collaborating organisations. It feels like that is probably what would help in launching a community site.
About collaborating across projects, if we really want this to happen and feel its more beneficial than doing our own separate activities then we need to get serious about sharing what we're doing. Transition Drupal was a nice idea but isnt moving because Transition alone doesn't have enough resources to create it, and also there are (as Matthew has summarised very well) a number of other organisations in the mix. Perhaps a more generic distro and platform could work? What about creating "Community Commons", or "Local Community Commons" (as the first is taken by something else)? This could be a holding place for these various activities and a way to pull elements of them together.
In practice at a more technical level the only logical way to more effectively share what we are doing and reduce duplication would be to use Features, or possibly Apps (as far as I can see). Each of us saying we have a distro doesn't get us anywhere, but breaking them down into Features and then debating what requirements are needed for each one as a group might work. What do we all need an Event to do for example? And define some common distro stuff like roles too. This is generally the approach Open Outreach takes and it seems one of the more effective ways of creating modular components in the Drupal community.
Each organisation could still have its own distro but could use common Features where possible. Saying that CT and CommunityForge both use the same Event Feature would be a step forward in sharing, OR we might find that the requirements are different, which would also be valuable information.
Now it might be that there are reasons why building a single integrated, interdependent distribution has benefits that a set of modular Features + some glue cannot create. If so it would be good to understand that too and agree that it is fine if separate distros continue to be created, but it does seem like a lot of effort.
Lets look at features
Thanks Paul I agree.
I've briefly reviewed a few 'nonprofit' platforms and I don't understand why they think 'nonprofit' constitutes any particular use case. Nonprofits are probably more diverse than commercial enterprises! I think what we here all the share to support community life in the meat world. And there are some very basic features we may all be able to agree on. For example:
- event calendar
- some basic user profile fields
- members can make and categorise their offerings.
- some kind of news posting, selection and broadcast
- some kind of voting or agreement system.
- support for proxy users who manage the accounts of old people.
- maybe credit clearing
- photo galleries of real people doing real things together.
- wysiwyg
- task management
- document storage
- SMS alerts
- mobile phone support
But deeper than this, if there were some basics we could agree on, then much of our feature code would be interchangable. For example:
roles
Omega theme (supports mobile), or just which regions should be present.
custom menus
filter formats
Vocabulary ID for all areas of life, if not the terms in that vocab
Names of commonly used fields e.g field_date, field_description, field_portrait
And then there is another conversation to be had about the fundamental architectures of the sites. Community Tools distro does everything with groups, which makes me queasy. Arie's design is very sophisticated and thus hard to share components. Community Weaver II can contribute nothing at this level because there is no code - it is replicated by copying the database. My work, Community Forge, has a pretty simple architecture - no panels, no contextual menus, so it would be a good starting point, but I wonder how extensible it would be.
I would like to continue this conversation and attempt to build up a spec for all actors in this group. I've done a lot already in this direction by myself, designing, building and maintaining the cforge distro over 3 years. My first concern is not actually Community Forge, but to produce re-usable code to bring down the cost of much larger projects.
Matthew
Cforge installation profile architecture
After another conversation with Arie I am posting my architecture here. Its becoming more apparent that core architectures are hard to compromise, but well written features depending on known things like roles, regions, menus could work.
Arie is pressing ahead with a full featured community site and I encourage him to talk to Ed, Paul and Henri about Transition Towns requirements and the work already done by community tools.
I encourage creando also to track this, because the resources Arie is putting in dwarfs what the rest of us can do, and he hopes to serve as many communities as possible. Here are his mockups again, remember this is already implemented in hebrew in D6: http://active-studio.co.il/cl/Likeabee/ALL_PAGES.html
So I just posted the Cforge architecture on my blog:
http://matslats.net/community-forge-drupal-architecture
Similar descriptions from Community Tools, GEN, and Likeabee would be useful. We shouldn't forget Timebanks UK either. They are expecting to have to build an installation from scratch. They have a heap of money, many similar requirements, but not yet the ability, it seems to articulate them.
LikeaBee platform
Thank You Mathew for your timely initiative...
I will be happy to explore concrete collaboration with anyone of the people , to start with I attached here a 3 pager describing our project that is now up and running in Hebrew with some very nice communities, some of them small and others larger (20,000 people of the National Bicycles Association of Israel the changed various cities like Tel Aviv into very bicycles riders friendly.
We are now starting integrating our platform in English and Multilingual it is on Drupal 7 with some improvements that came out of the real life experience...
Below are the English Designs that we are now implementing in Drupal 7 and an Example of one Organization's site in the Kaveret (Bee Hive in Hebrew) which is the Israeli LikeaBee...
http://active-studio.co.il/cl/Likeabee/ALL_PAGES.html
http://hakaveret.org.il/en/group/%D7%9E%D7%A8%D7%9B%D7%96-%D7%94%D7%A9%D...
Likeabee-Some screens of the English designsPAGES
LikeaBe, English designs that go now into the Drupal 7 platform of
(to move forward press each time on the page to get back to the Menu)
See also example of a site of one Group- Community (Heschel) in English) on our Drupal platform.
LikeaBee -Kaveret one community site of Heschel
As you can see it is a comprehensive system that is designed to facilitate any Community with a full set of tools that is needed for a transition initiative and Community...
Your input and collaboration will be met with Great enthusiasm and I hope we can integrate the strengths of our platform so they can best serve our common goals...
I will be happy to talk on Skype to anyone who is interested and learn more about your system and further needs as well as introducing our system
Arie
Skypename:
ariebendavid
What's new in this space, with LikeaBee
What's new in this space, with LikeaBee, etc.?
Launching GEN sites
Hello
I presented our platform in this threat before. There wasn't a lot of reaction, but this first contact led to having Matslats on board since a year, which is greatl.
I want to announce that we brought the platform to a satisfying state, and it is starting to get globaly used, in collaboration with networks of all continents. Even if still we did not announce the official launch. But we are close.
Have a look here:
http://sites.ecovillage.org
http://db.ecovillage.org
http://casa.ecovillage.org
http://rie.ecovillage.org
all run on the same multiside.
We are still looking for more members in our team. If you are interested , please get in contact.
Best wishes
Achim