[MG] Mapping Participation in Drupal

[conseo]

Am Sunday 16 January 2011 schrieb Alex Rollin:
> Also, a nice write-up:
> http://developmentseed.org/blog/2009/dec/17/opening-afghanistans-election-d
> ata-open-source-data-browser
> 
>  of how these tools are used to power the site:
> http://afghanistanelectiondata.org/data

Thanks for pointing it out, I have bookmarked it. The main problem that I see 
is that they have a quite different focus although their visualization (view) 
has some common ground with Crossforum and we might be able to learn from them 
at least.
Their site is about visualization of static content after official elections, so 
they can pull all data easily once in their DB and are done. We program a live 
tool which consists only of a bit of glue for a completely open infrastructure 
regarding drafting media, poll server concepts and even the discussion media 
involved.  Focusing on Drupal only would roll-back the whole perspective of 
Crossforum + open network to a single well-designed free web-frameworkl. What 
is likely possible and might be interesting is to ask them for cooperation and 
make them compatible with Crossforum, so we share as much code and 
infrastructure as possible.
In fact this introduces a new use case of a specific kind of pollserver, where 
it is only about exposing the historically fixed and static data of some official 
elections which is about to be visualized in the mapper. Since our effort is 
very generic, this should fit in nicely and be a profit for both concepts, 
visualization of official voting data and an actual voting network. They would 
have to come to us though, since we are more generic, which is pretty unlikely 
in my experience. And they even have to drop their implementation and switch 
to Java/GWT for that, whcih is even more unlikely. You could try to convince 
them though, they would definetly profit in the long term.

> > 
> > There's a rather modern feed parser for Drupal:
> > http://drupal.org/project/feeds

In general finding feed implementations is not the problem, they are pretty 
standard today. I have had a look at Atom first, too, when thinking about the 
diff feed service, as I might want to use them in a news-reader on my desktop 
for some issues and support for it is pretty standard. For Java this looks 
pretty good: http://abdera.apache.org/

But there is a very serious drawback when it comes to using Atom in a 
crossforum tool. It hits the wall of single origin policy. That way we have to 
use JSONP and although it is more "low-level" it is much more flexible and 
scalable for us since we don't have to xml-parse the data or work around Atom 
and some middleware like Drupal or Abdera. I often like to have a look around 
how others do things and if I can easily reuse open-source code, but in 
Crossforum/Votorola's case I think Michael got it right, by keeping it as 
simple as possible.

Since what we all (not only Votorola) do here is pretty new lands and 
prototyping we don't want to bend around current concepts of web frameworks. 
They are not designed for cross-server web-uis or even global distributed 
networks, but in most cases rather to build some server-side service. For that 
reason we cannot even use GWT's RPC, since GWT is originally focused on 
developping commercial web services rather then a distributed web.
In fact, when looking at single-origin-policy, we even hit the current web-
browser concepts hard when it comes to opening the web up, since they are 
bound to at least one main client -> server connection. You cannot browse 
ressources which are not stored on a single domain/host name yet. 

Have also a look at kio-magnet here:
http://whilos.blogsite.org where I have proven that you can distribute the web  
and desktop in any way you can imagine when you break the current URL-standard 
and combine that with BitTorrent. This might be interesting even for 
Crossforum, as we can store both the app and parts of the data in a 
distributed shared space then.

Christian (conseo)



Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
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