[MG] Drupal integration (was: MG] Decorating the bite feed - coding plan)

[conseo]

> On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 12:20 AM, conseo <4consensus at web.de> wrote:
> > http://afghanistanelectiondata.org/election/2009/data/
> > Is the software behind this site completely open?
> > It would also prove that we really implement "cross"-forum in a very nice
> > example.
> 
> It is all GPL, as far as I know.  Drupal is now a rich, rich ecosystem
> of creative ventures.  Lot's of things happening.

I know, it is really awesome nowadays. I am even thinking about dropping my 
blog's Wordpress installation and replace it with Drupal, since I can easily 
document what I do in a less blog-centric way. But this is not necessary atm. 
so I'll leave it for now.
If all the vote data processing and visualization is GPL'ed then we are pretty 
lucky indeed, if they have done it in a generic way.

> 
> Here's a peek at where my peers in are at with regard to JSON.  I
> wouldn't be any better off than they if I were to get started, but
> this is where the JSON feed fits in.
> http://drupal.org/node/738654
> 
> That's an issue for the feeds module, as the parser is used to parse
> the input and enter it into the db through the feeds 'interface'.
> Then whatever other modules take care of mapping, display, whatever.
> 
> jquery and jquery-ui ship with the drupal-7 core, now, so, yeh.

Having a quick look at it as well as at 
http://drupal.org/project/feeds_jsonpath_parser in particular, it should be 
really straightforward. 
Thinking a bit about your Drupal ideas tonight, I am sure it would help us. 
Until now, as I understand, we focus on creating an open network architecture 
for all kind of poll-servers and possible e-dem solutions as well as an 
overview tool, Crossforum. By bringing Drupal to table, not directly to build 
Crossforum on it, but by using its awesome functionality to document what is 
going on, we have a very valuable tool for outside organisations like lobby-
groups, politicial parties or especially journalists to work with the data in 
any (undemocratical/fixed) way they like to.
We want to have as much communciation in a consensus building way and 
therefore want to actually pull the users completely in the network so no 
information is lost, but it is unrealistic that we satisfy all needs. So 
making Drupal a possible drafting medium is very interesting, but even only 
being able to easily pull and present data from the network and present it 
meaningfully (like in the afghanistan example) would be really helpful to 
tease more people. At least this is what I would do to give new users and 
outsiders a quick overview what is possibly going on and how people use this 
thing.

> 
> I told Michael that I'm interested in figuring out a way to create a
> Drupal drafting solution.  Working with Owne the last 3 months has
> really sparked my interest in being able to markup long documents with
> more structure, like section S.11.45.777 in a bill, to compare that
> section against the same section in a new proposal for example, where
> both also have a unique id for that field and the section.  That's
> where I'm focused right now, anticipating our renewed discussion about
> drafting and the interplay of drafting environments and the slick
> cascade at some point.
>

Ok. I think at least for the semantic mediawiki, which is used by Votorola as 
default in the pollwiki, this should be really easy as it is its main design 
focus. In fact you can define any relational markup you need and keep that in 
different positions of the same poll, so you can even consensually change the 
form of the document (the markup), which is *really* important imo, since we 
don't want to impose form on our users content/consensus. 
It should also be easy to pull certain positions and polls into Drupal to 
document the work of a specific group (since the sheer volume of communication 
and information may drown many users), so maybe you don't even have to care 
about drafting in Drupal for now. This is not opposing Drupal as a drafting 
medium of course. Don't know how much work it is to make drafting possible and 
what you have done already.
The only problem with a semantic mediawiki is to get the users comfortable 
with the markup, which is not easily (like in WYSIWYG) solvable if we want to 
have freely definable markup imo. But it shouldn't be too hard and you don't 
have to know anything about it if you clone another position and simply change 
some text inbetween.

What do you think, does that sound reasonable for you? I will focus on 
development of Crossforum now, but if you want to work that out, I think both 
me and Michael are willing to help you. I also think that the bite-
representation of Michael is now stable in its general form, so once the diff 
feed is setup (in the next weeks) you should be already able to pull 
communicational data in. Pulling information about voting should already be 
possible, but you have to talk with Mike about that for now.

Conseo



Originally posted to the mailing list of the Metagovernment Project:
http://metagovernment.org/mailman/listinfo/start_metagovernment.org