Development Seed Blog

Making Preparedness Information More Accessible

Yesterday we handed off the beta version of the new Disaster Assistance component Kit that we built for the American Institute of Architects’ Communities by Design Initiative. The kit is a fully functional disaster preparedness curriculum that aggregates AIA Communities by Design’s excellent resources to   one website that runs off of a usb drive that’s actually smaller than my thumb nail.

The kit is more than just a great resource library – it also bridges the gap between disaster preparedness and disaster response in an exciting way. 

All of the website components – the site itself (powered by Drupal), the server that runs it (powered by Xamp), the browser (Firefox on a stick), and the PDF viewer  (Sumatra) – are all self contained on the drive. This means that the kit will work on any computer in the world regardless of whether it’s connected to the internet, and it will run on both PCs and Macs.

Building an SMS framework to integrate with Drupal

Considering the technology is 15 years old, text messaging is sadly lacking in its ability to integrate with other applications. Luckily that’s about to get easier, and it’s long overdue.

This summer Will White is developing a framework that allows sms functionality to easily integrate with Drupal as part of Google’s Summer of Code. By the end of the summer, he’ll have created a driver-based API that works with common sms service providers and syncs with Drupal core and contributed modules. This means the hottest open source content management system will soon have the best sms integration, and everyone with a Drupal website can take advantage of it.

Our Team Aggregator Catches Some Buzz

Salon.com has an awesome story today about Pierre Wielezynski's work helping the World Bank become better listeners. The article explores why he came up with some of the functionality that we built for him in the BuzzMonitor, or what is now being called the "Super Aggregator."

From the article:

The World Bank contracted with the software firm Development Seed to build the new program, with additional input from the World Resources Institute. Development Seed relied on the popular open-source content management system Drupal for its core code. Last week the bank announced that version 1.0 of BuzzMonitor was available for free download to all comers, and suggested that it was particularly applicable to nonprofit organizations interested in monitoring what the Web was saying about them. (The decision to open-source BuzzMonitor need not be taken as some kind of altruistic move by the bank. By using base code that is protected by the free software GNU General Public License, my understanding is that the bank was required to make any modifications or add-ons freely available.)

The World Bank just made its open source aggregator BuzzMonitor available to the public to take for a test drive. This is great news. We worked with the World Bank to build the system, based on Pierre Wielezynski's ideas for source profiling, Yahoo term extraction, Technorati integration, Alexa rankings, tagging, voting and graphing. World Resources Institute also played a hand in the development and is currently using a customized version to track news internally. There is now an online demo up that shows how the World Bank monitors news about AIDS and Africa.

We just received an email saying that our proposal "Portal 2.0: Using Social Software to Connect Geographically Dispersed Teams" has been accepted to be presented at the Web2forDev conference this September, scheduled during e-Agriculture week. So after DrupalCon, I’m off to Rome to present the Drupal powered intranet package we’ve been developing :) !

Let's cool off from the DC heat tomorrow, June 5th, with some beers and catch up on what everyone has been working on. I know a lot of folks here in DC have been jamming on some awesome projects and we could all benefit from learning about them and sharing our own work.

The meetup will be at the Science Club 1136 19th Street NW, which is in between the Dupont Circle and Farragut North Metro stops. We'll get started at 7:00 pm.