I am co-coordinating a team to update the feature-set available through the permaculture.org.uk website.
The site is owned and run by the Permaculture Association Britain, a charity working with sustainability issues like climate change, energy descent (peak oil) and solutions to them.
We intend to increase the scope of the site: to include much more user content and create an on-line community as well as to increase the number of features available to users.
We are setting up a team to collaborate and evaluate the options open to us.
This team will include the Permaculture Association, Leeds office, our web developer, members of the permaculture community and software developers. With this in mind we have setup a site for use as a place to collaborate and to test online technologies. That said we have really only quite limited resources currently available for this project.
During this development work we hope to create/modify a piece of opensource software for use as a tool for the permaculture community. And for this, Drupal is the most attractive option.
One of the aims of this development work is to connect up the work of the different groups, projects and designers in the permacommunity, and to create a cohesive online permacommunity.
We hope that the implementation of these tools will encourage writing and publishing within the permaculture community, extended from the model of citizen journalism and media activism (indymedia).
We hope to offer homepages and "myspace" features (profile pages, bookmarking and image galleries eg http://www.flickr.com/photos/nielscorfield/), to implement current technologies like: tagging (http://del.icio.us/), and syndicated news feeds (RSS, atom feeds).
Some of these goals are ambitious but we hope to implement the software in phases. Currently our site is at phase 4: bespoke, asp and CSS over Access DB.
These services and features will be available to the whole international community, either through permaculture.org.uk or for them to host themselves. Perhaps it would be appropriate to work towards a permaculture distribution of Drupal?
Here is the URL for our test site, very recently setup.
http://bhweblin.hostinguk.com/drupal/
Any comments or suggestions welcomed.
Comments
Very similar project here
I'm starting to work on permaculturequebec.net, a network to share news and events, exchange services and knowledge, etc.
Already planned a layout very similar to yours and I just found your site. It is extremely inspiring.
I'm planning to use drupal7 standard but am also considering using drupal commons. So far I'm building main website in standard with commons.permaculturequebec.net to try it.