Drupal

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.

Now that I have this site Drupalized, I can now start treating it as a cafe and not just a window into the project. Blogger Hossein Derakhashan talks about blogs being a window into a community, a bridge between communities, and a cafe where people can chat about different topics.

Up until now, EchoChamberProject.com has served as a window for the production of this film for transparency's stake. It can now take it to the next level by treating it more like a cafe where conversations can happen within the internal blogs. It can also now serve more as a community of practice where this virtual space can be used more for collaboration.

I'm posting in the following code to try and claim this blog on Technorati:
Technorati Profile

In switching over from Movable Type to Drupal, I'm trying to get Technorati to claim my new blog URL of http://www.echochamberproject.com/kentbye.

Drupal is supposed to ping Ping-O-Matic whenever I post an entry -- Ping-O-Matic is supposed to then ping Technorati.

But by going directly to Ping-O-Matic, the user can choose which sites to ping (Technorati is but just one of many). And so far I haven't found the internal Drupal configuration that would tell Ping-O-Matic which specific sites to ping.

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 planning on taking a bus or train up to New York City next Sunday night in order to attend the Personal Democracy Forum. The tagline is "Technology is Changing Politics."

It's only one day, and there are going to be a ton of movers and shakers there.

I had a chance to met a number of these speakers at SXSW Interactive, and I have a little bit clearer vision of where I'm at and where I'm going.

I'm there to network and get the word out on my project, but to learn as well.

I've been on the road for the last week or so, and I have some time to work on the site more. I've been proofreading some more transcripts and I'm going to be posting more soon.

I finally figured out how to upload and post pictures to Drupal posts. I'm getting some errors, and I'm not sure if that's because Moshe uploaded the latest updates to 4.6.0, which means that some things may be a bit more unstable.

This site has finally been converted over to Drupal.
Thanks to Moshe Weitzman for all of his administrative help with the conversion.
I'll be updating the design theme soon, and I'm still learning the ropes on Drupal.
I still need to figure out how to upload pictures, update some of the old links and fix the broken tables.
I'm on the road, and in the process of proof reading more interview transcripts. I intend to post more sometime next week.
I'm glad to have the permanent URLs now, and I'm pushing forward with specifying what I need to manifest the

The Echo Chamber is a documentary on the failures of the mainstream media, and how I produce this film will hopefully provide some solutions to this infotainment bottleneck.

I'm trying to develop more sophisticated techniques for citizen journalism by open sourcing my interview material and collaboratively producing The Echo Chamber on a Drupal/CivicSpace platform. More details are below...

Keywords

* Drupal Modules
* Folksonomy & Taxonomy
* User Interface
* Collaborative Journalism

Flowchart:

Intention:

* Create a Drupal-based infrastructure that facilitates the centralized collection of volunteer metadata on original interview source material.
* Break up interviews into sound bite chunks, number the chunks for ID purposes, and provide links for users to easily contribute qualitative and quantitative metadata.

Keywords

* Collaborative Content Development
* Media Transparency
* Exporting Data from Drupal
* Open Source Business Plan

Intention

* Develop a formal thematic taxonomy for the documentary that is informed by the emergent patterns of the folksonomy tags collected from volunteers in Phase 03
* Open Source the Business Plan to further discuss the target audience and strategic communication intentions for The Echo Chamber documentary.
* Normalize and export the quantitative data on sound bite Source Credibility & Quality, and import this data into Final Cut Pro editing software through Final Cut Pro XML.