CivicActions

On Sunday I hear with much sadness about the Cyclone that hit the Irrawady Delta in Burma. With each day the news gets worse. Some 22,000 Burmese presumed dead. Sometimes an event happens that in an instant captures the attention of the world, while even larger tragedies go unnoticed for decades. Such is the case in Burma. Back in the mid nineties I was involved in the Free Burma movement on college campuses, specifically at NYU, and helped pass selective purchasing legislation in the NY City Council.

I had the joy of attending Linuxfest Northwest on April 26 in Bellingham, WA. The weather was great (just like last year), and the atmosphere relaxed and fun.

Linuxfest is a 2-day community event, run by volunteers and free to the public. It is such a cozy atmosphere, and it is easy to interact with the speakers and the exhibitors.

The CivicActions team is in high spirits today with the launch of our newest project, MeNotMeth.org.

MeNotMeth.org. is part of an $11-million California state campaign of billboards, bus wraps, cable TV ads and the website aimed at discouraging gay men from using methamphetamine. A statewide survey recently found that crystal meth use was 11 times more common among gay men than in the California population overall.

Better World Advertising provided the brilliant design and wireframes which CivicActions developed and themed in Drupal.

From the start the project we were under a tight deadline, due to a looming marketing campaign which included the website URL. Despite the pressure BWA and CA always remained friendly and flexible, contributing the the successful launch!

The site functionality includes user-submitted video functionality (including transcoding lots of different file types), basic registration, content moderation, Spanish-language internationalization, a self-assessment module, and more.

Community Contributed Modules

In addition to all the contributed modules, one notable module was specifically developed for this project:

mm_flvtool2 found at (http://drupal.org/project/mm_flvtool2) gathers meta data from a flash file and attaches it to the node. This is how we are able to display the length of the videos on the Your Stories page of the site.

Of course, this is part of a bigger package of using XSPF Playlist and FLV Media Player which provides the flash player for videos and the TV commercial - both in English and Spanish.

All uploaded video is stored on Amazon's S3, while displayed through Drupal, using the Arthur's contributed Media Mover module.

Media Mover, XSPF Playlist, FLV Media Player received new commits and patches because of this project. For instance, flvmediaplayer allows an administrator to set the "style" of the player (e.g. foreground color, background color, allow full screen and more.

An acquaintance of mine was detained by Homeland Security. His recently expired US visa landed him in the detention center in Tacoma, WA, where he had no legal counsel for 6 weeks:

Now, close your eyes and imagine what we could to with a year out of Iraq.

GOOD Magazine's January/February 2008 IDEAS! issue features the WITNESS Video Hub.

Amnesty International launched a total overhaul of their website on December 10th (World Human Rights Day). The new site was developed in Drupal, with CRM components provided by CiviCRM and was integrated with a sister project to migrate Amnesty International's ancient lotus notes database of 50K+ reports and press communications to alfresco (http://alfresco.org), an open source document management system.

Today, December 10, 2007, marks two important birthdays:

It's been a very rich Thanksgiving for me - I've been shown a lot to be grateful for in the last few days. There's been a lot of sadness and/or strife in the lives of a lot of people I love in the last couple of weeks (including me) - it seems like there's been some kind of huge karmic crunch happening and in the loss and trouble, I find myself being reminded how much I have to be thankful for.

In September we launched JustCauseIt.com (beta) a social networking website that acts as a companion to a forthcoming print magazine. When the folks at JUSTCAUSE came to us with their idea and told me their mission is (as they put it on the website):