Openness

For anyone working in social change who's ever struggled with the question "Why do I bother?" this is for you, my peeps. I'm available to deliver this presentation to your meeting or conference. Just ask and we'll see if we can work something out.

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At the Web of Change conference, we discussed "In these times, what does Strategy mean?"  

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On Sept 1, the FCC filed GN Docket No. 09-191 (Full PDF, Summary) which is a public notice opening a 30-day comment period on Preserving the Open Internet. This is a call for comments and proposals for policy changes that will affect what is commonly known as "Net Neutrality".

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Our friends at Code For America today announced the launch of CiviCommons, a place on the web for governments at every level to share the software they are building (or have built). As the Open Source ethic continues to drive itself into Government, there becomes an obvious need to share the fruits of the labor of people who'd otherwise not have such a forum.

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My work with CivicActions recently provided the opportunity to create a minor, but much needed improvement to CiviCRM which has just been made available to everyone in the recent CiviCRM 3.2.3 release.

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No, Code for America isn't looking for a couple thousand gentlemen.  They're looking for geeks (of any gender) to award yearlong Fellowships (living wage, health insurance, travel expenses) starting in 2011 to build Government 2.0 apps for a number of local governments. 

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What're you crazy!? Haven't you ever heard of the CCK module? Yes, it's true CCK coupled with views will allow one to create, manipulate and display custom content. Combined with hook_nodeapi, the cck/views combo is can be extremely powerful and flexible. 99% of the time these two modules are sufficient to handle the job of building and managing custom content. The problem arises when you need any sort of custom access control or ownership of your custom node content. With CCK, the ownership of the node belongs to node.module, and there's no 'access' operator exposed in hook_nodeapi. You could patch core ( http://drupal.org/node/143075 ), but in general, that's not really a road you want to start down.

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I posted a blog on another site entitled Distributed Social Networking requires Secure Online Identity that discusses, among other things, the new "anti-Facebook" Diaspora* and the need for a solid foundation built upon secure, distributed, user-centric digital identity.  There's another, less technical piece of the puzzle.

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At DrupalCon in San Francisco I sat on a panel "From Contractor To Shop" hosted by Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg from Zivtech.

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Within the next few hours, many members of the CivicActions team will start making their way from various parts of the planet to converge (along with pretty darn close to THREE THOUSAND other Drupalistas, Drupallers, Drupalgeeks, GeeksForGood, Drupalheads, Drupal enthusiasts and just about every other version of Drupalhuman you can imagine.) in the beautiful city of San Francisco to share what we've learned in the last year about working with this, dare I say, platform.

I started thinking about all this and start getting really psyched to be leaving Nashville to return "home" to t

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