Debates, Open Source CMSs, and Start Ups

In typical DC-style, life is getting more political as we get within a month of the presidential election. If you haven’t yet registered to vote, get going. Today is the last day to register for Washington, DC and Virginia residents, while Maryland residents have until October 14. In more politics, it seems like almost every bar is throwing a debate watching party on Tuesday for the second presidential debate. If you don’t want to play debate bingo or presidential flip cup, stay in tomorrow night and plan to go out the rest of the week instead when there are some interesting tech events taking place. As always, a full listing can be found at DC Tech Events.

All Week

Plone Conference: Open source conferences seem to be flocking to Washington, DC, and with good reason since the city is home to so many techies using open source. If you work with Plone or want to, check out the conference and some of the post-conference parties.

Tuesday, October 7 and Wednesday, October 8

10:00 am

Presenting Data and Information: A One-Day Course by Edward Tufte: There’s little question that Edward Tufte is the master of presenting a ton of data in a clear, concise, and compelling way. If you want to up your data visualization know-how, check out this course.

Wednesday, October 8

7:00 – 9:00 pm

Drupal Lab: Here’s your chance to tear into the code behind a module with Drupal developers of all levels, show off your latest work, or just get a feel for what it’s like to program in Drupal.

Listen to the Podcast Interview: Open Source for NGO's

Yesterday Jason Wojciechowski from the UN Millennium Campaign interviewed our own Eric Gundersen about his thoughts on how nonprofit organizations can use open source applications like Drupal for the End Poverty Blog. Eric talks, amongst other things, about how the accessibility of Drupal and some of its newer features like multilingual support make it a leading application for nonprofits of all sizes located around in the world.

Listen to the podcast.

One Web Server + Drupal Per Child

We've been hearing a lot of talk about how the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) needs more software developed for it if it's going to really live up to its potential impact. Since lately we've been developing some generalizable applications like a Disaster Relief Stick that runs a disaster relief toolset on a USB drive, an intranet package to help geographically dispersed teams communicate, and our first product Managing News (all built on Drupal), I thought it would be fun to see how easy it is to get Drupal running on the OLPC laptop and to see what the potential is for some other cool applications like these getting on there. 

Turns out that Drupal could be a flexible software application for the OLPC laptop. Three hours later (minus four hours spent hunting down a bug noted below) Drupal was up and running. Right now, I'm viewing the Drupal site being served off the OLPC next to my desk from my MacBook via its private IP address. Wow, it's fast! The hardest part about the installation was the small keyboard ; ).

Just think of all the applications that - once made lighter - students could get on their OLPC laptops. Our next move it to get our intranet package on the OLPC machine - its light weight wiki could help students collaborate together on their own machines. You can imagine how Drupal and OLPC can be used to help organize classrooms where students use OLPCs in a mesh network, with or without greater internet connectivity. We all know Drupal can do practically anything and can usually do it quite well. Now there is the opportunity for classroom intranets, student-editable wikis, and teacher portals to run on OLPCs. Each OLPC can be a web server, with the potential to serve Drupal to other students and teachers. That leaves the possibility for each child of OLPC to become a web content manager, a web server administrator, a content collaborator/creator, and ultimately, a Drupal hacker.

But getting back to what you really want to know - how we did it. (Note: We'll maintain a wiki of these instructions on the groups.drupal.org page.)

Baseline Magazine Looks at How the Bank Does Knowledge Management

I received a nice email this morning with a link to an article on knowledge management and was pleasantly surprised to see that it named the World Bank as one of the top five companies that gets knowledge management. What great credit for the organization.

We’ve worked on several different knowledge management projects with the World Bank, from an intranet for its communications team to a community portal for its Global Development Learning Network to a news tracking system to help them follow development news, and have always been impressed with their ideas and commitment to using technology to better handle information.

From the article:

"Amidst the World Bank's recent management brouhaha, a more significant event has gone overlooked - the bank's dramatic transformation from a hierarchical source of low-interest loans to a decentralized organization that uses knowledge-sharing technologies to fight poverty and disease in developing nations. The enabler of this transformation: the bank's overhaul of its antiquated I.T. infrastructure and construction of a truly global network."

The World Bank certainly has developed some great new technology and systems to improve knowledge sharing and connect their worldwide team, so it’s great to see them get a shout out like this. I wonder how much of their forward thinking here was credited to their use of open source software and Drupal in some of these systems. Well, that didn’t make the article, but I’m still curious : )

You can read the whole article here.

Gábor Hojtsy: Multilingual Support Solutions and How they Compare

Recently I had the pleasure of reading and editing Gábor Hojtsy's thesis on multilingual web applications and open source systems. If you're interested in multilingual support, I highly recommend reading it once it's publicly released. In the meantime, Gábor will be sharing some of his findings and insights right here on the Development Seed Blog. Below is the first installment in his series on multilingual support for open source platforms.

For those of you who aren't in the Drupal community, Gábor is a Drupal superstar. In addition to being a core committer for Drupal and a co-maintainer of Drupal 6 (still to be released), he's also a lead developer of Drupal's expanded and enhanced support for multilingual websites, along with our very own Jose Reyero.

-Bonnie Bogle

Multilingual Support Solutions and How they Compare

By Gábor Hojtsy

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 :) !