[MG] Mapping Participation in Drupal

[Alex Rollin]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 2:01 PM, Ed Pastore
> However, am I right in understanding that this distributed hosting approach
> couldn't be applied to, say, MediaWiki?

Yes, and it will need to be re-written in order to do so.  This is a
new trend towards de-centralization and so a period of adaptation will
come into play.

As far as Drupal is concerned, I was saying that it offers the most
impressive feed parsing, feed content display, mapping, and re-feeding
abilities of any of the FOSS projects out there of which I am aware.
There are packaged distributions available, for free, that do this out
of the box, and can serve the function of creating a sort of theater
application for any site or collection of sites.  I was pointing it
out as an option for use in the creation of dramatic mapping and
munging of data from vote softwares if the use case for crossforum's
prototype goes in that direction.

Mike and Conseo, as I understand it, have a familiarity with GWT,
Google Web Toolkit, and they are making a lot of progress in creating
the crossforum app using that and will continue to do so.  I looked
into GWT and I agree that it's pretty amazing.

My own intention is to see that there's a way to build structured
positions, with multiple sections, for instance, so that apps like
Drupal can act as drafting media as well as pollservers within the
Open Architecture that Votorola is built into.  I've done a lot of
reading about StratML which is an example of how documents can be
structured, and there are other examples of schemas used specifically
for legislation.  In the next few months (?) I'll be working on
integrating the use of semntic mediawiki's semantic forms to do some
experiments with this and also in Drupal.  Here's an example of a
relevant snippet from semantic forms for Mediawiki:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Forms#Multiple_values_for_the_same_field

Example is here:
http://discoursedb.org/wiki/Special:FormEdit/Item/Example_item

That could be used to simply allow a user who is drafting a position
to create a section for each paragraph or sentence in the proposal.

This would then allow proposals to be compared in a structured way and
also, in the process, allow us to create a unique identifier for each
of these sections of arbitrary length for later reference, review, or
whatever else is needed.  I've already started the experiment and hope
to continue on after I move house in the next couple of weeks.

Alex



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