At tonight’s Washington, DC Drupal meetup, I will give a presentation on the new “Ideas feature” we built as part of a recent Open Atrium deployment we did for the Department of Education (Ian wrote a great blog post last week about the Department of Education’s new Idea Engine platform). The Ideas feature allows users to post ideas that other users can vote and comment on and works both inside and outside of groups. And what is really exciting is that the Department of Education is letting this code be released publicly to help create open source efficiencies with other agencies.

The feature will be publicly released on github shortly and is designed to be dropped in and used on any Open Atrium or Drupal site — it’s completely pluggable. Tonight I’ll talk about technically how this is possible by using Kit, a set of guidelines that makes it easy to build compatible and interoperable Features for any Drupal site. Irakli Nadareishvili will join me to talk about how the team at Phase2 Technology is using this and other Features in their distributions like Open Public and Open Publish.

Tonight’s meetup is at 7:00 pm at Stetson’s, and it should be very interesting with four other talks also on the lineup:

• Examples of how the Department of Homeland Security is using Drupal by Anthony Glynn and Dan Katz

• Showcase of OOSKAnews.com by Eric Johnson

• Using Drupal on the iPhone by Bryan Colligan

• Building a development team with training by Cindy McCourt

Looking forward to seeing everyone tonight!