The Ideation feature for Open Atrium, originally designed for the U.S. Department of Education’s Idea Engine site, is now fully open sourced and available on Drupal.org. The Ideation feature is essentially a crowd-sourced suggestion box, which in the case of the Department of Education allows employees to suggest improvements and vote on them to vet ideas suggested by colleagues. With today’s public release, the feature can now be dropped into any Open Atrium 1.0 Beta X site and work, right out of the box. Here is look at this feature in action:

The team we worked with at the Department of Education is excited to release this custom feature publicly to help improve efficiencies within the government and share with agencies that needed similar functionality. The feedback we received on Ian’s post reinforced that this functionality is commonly sought after.

It was possible for us to release what would have in the past been completely custom work because of the Kit specification. Kit provides rules and guidelines for developing features that allow you to build them with a reasonable level of interoperability. Adhering to this spec is what allowed the Ideation feature to look like this in the “Idea Engine” site:

But look like this when installed on a stock Open Atrium installation:

We worked closely with the team at Phase2 Technology to open this feature up. Phase2 will maintain the feature and is planning to upgrade it to Drupal 7 so it can work in Open Public, their Drupal distribution for the government. Big thanks to both the Department of Education for pushing to release this feature and to Phase2 for supporting and improving it.