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Yesterday, Eric talked about how feature servers can help organizations manage and update features on different of sites and I pulled together a screencast of an initial proof-of-concept. While we’ve been talking about these ideas in the office for a while, the actual implementation is very new and I was surprised at how quickly it went – in all, the feature server took less than a day to build.

Adrian pointed out to me that this very simple version of a feature server could be a feature itself. It turns out he was right – it is largely generic site building with some additional custom components:

Today a group of 50+ experts in public health, communications, and defense from both the private and public sectors are gathering at the National Institute of Health to talk about pandemic preparedness and community resilience around the H1N1 flu. So far the talks have been great, with Vint Cerf and David Alberts leading off this morning, and Larry Brilliant scheduled to address everyone this afternoon.

It's common for organizations to run 20+ different program websites. The bulk of these program sites need several of the same features like a public blog, a pressroom, and media resources. A few key programs might need a sensitive CCK-based reporting feature that was designed in house.

This screencast by Young, who blogged about the power of decentralized features yesterday, is a first look at how a feature server will let you pull features from multiple sources and get updates for them in both public and potentially secure and private ways. If you're not familiar with the features module, you may want to watch the screencast introducing it before watching this one.

After my previous post introducing Features, people had some very good questions. How can you share features that you’ve built? And how can other users get your features?

We think the answer to these questions is to use a feature server. At its simplest, a feature server is a website where someone can get features and get updates for those features. It could be a private repository for a network of Drupal sites within an organization, or it could be a public facing site from which anyone can download and add features to their own Drupal website.

Stumble Safely got a great mention in the July issue of Wired : ) In an article on Vivek Kundra, the CIO of the United States, and his missive to get government data online, in one place, and open and accessible (aka Data.gov), Stumble Safely was mentioned as an example of what can come from opening up data like this. We built the site in last year’s Apps for Democracy contest, which was an effort Kundra backed while CTO of Washington, DC to get people to build apps that use DC’s government data.

It’s officially summer! But that doesn’t mean that the city slows down – well, at least until August. This week there are quite a few technology events happening in Washington, DC. Below are a few that caught our eye. You can find a full listing of the week’s tech events here.

Monday, June 22

6:00 – 8:00 pm

Mediacurrent collaborated with InterMedia Outdoors, Inc. to redesign their family of interactive websites using the Drupal content management system as a foundation. This required the migration and restructuring of content from several websites hosted by a legacy content management system (CMS.) The result was a fresh, modern web design and a social network that allowed Intermedia’s users to access a vast repository of content quickly and easily. This case study focuses on www.in-fisherman.com, the first website Mediacurrent developed for InterMedia Outdoors, Inc.

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How fast can you install modules? Drush, the Drupal command line utility, takes what normally is a tedious task and turns it into a delightful experience.

Final Times
Manual Method: 2:38:75
Drush Method: 1:17:57

Module installation is just one of the things Drush can help you with. Learn what else it can do for you on the project page: http://drupal.org/project/drush.

Después del curso del 17 de junio en Medialab-Prado, varios de los asistentes al curso nos quedamos un rato después (cerca de 1 hora cuchicheando y cotilleando cosas del mundo Drupal) y decidimos que al igual que hay un curso el 3 miércoles de cada mes vamos a montar una reunión mensual.

Esta reunión mensual se centrará básicamente en:
Cerveza (o jugos similares).
Drupal
Cerveza
Drupal

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A few of us will be heading over to the OpenStreetMap Mapping party this Saturday (6/20) where we’ll meet up with other mappers, grab a GPS device, and hit the streets to better map out parts of Washington, DC.

All the data we collect – like roads, businesses, landmarks, hiking trails, etc. – will then be uploaded to OpenStreetMap. The data in OSM is maintained like a wiki, so if you find a mistake, outdated information, or missing information you can do something about it. The data is made available under a creative commons license, so it’s free for anyone to use in any application. Mapping parties like the one happening this weekend are an important part of the OSM project. They help volunteers learn how to use GPS devices and upload their data, and they get more people walking around with GPS devices working to add more accurate and up-to-date the data.

For more information about the OpenStreetMap project watch the video introduction or check out the official wiki.

Open Atrium (formally code named 8trees) is an open source intranet package powered by Drupal that’s fast and easy to install and start using, and open source so you can customize it to meet your exact needs. It’s first public release will be in mid July, and all of its code will be hosted on Github as an open beta. To be first in line to access the code, message @open_atrium on twitter.

As a team intranet, Open Atrium let’s you coordinate on projects with the people you work with – whether that’s to facilitate programs around the world for an international organization, to organize the communications outreach for an advocacy campaign, or to run out simultaneous projects for a software development company. Out of the box you can create different spaces for different projects, add people to each space, and turn on different tools within each space, including a blog, a wiki, a calendar, a casetracker, and a micro blog.

I'm looking at a fresh new copy of Drupal 5 Views Recipes . I wrote it, and I'm thrilled to see it in print.

I have a mix of Drupal 5 and Drupal 6 sites out there. If you've got any Drupal 5 sites, consider this book.

It’s shaping up to be pretty typical summer week in Washington, DC – at least weather wise, with sun and evening thunderstorms in the forecast almost every day this week. I can’t say that’s surprising, but it does mean more people looking for places to duck into during the evening commute to wait until the storm breaks. At least there some interesting technology events lined up for this week that can give you some respite, including a open source mapping party, a discussion on how to best deliver UX designs, and a CloudCamp. Below is a look at the events that caught our eye.

Tuesday, June 16

7:00 pm

Tonight Tom MacWright will lead an ignite talk on how open data can be made more usable, and he'll show how we did this with TIGER mapping data - which includes shape files of school districts, voting districts, county boundaries, and more - by hosting it in Amazon's cloud - rather than relying on the slow and clunky infrastructure it was on. Tom blogged about this here as it pertains to a website we built displaying data on school districts in the United States, and tonight will talk about how having access to this data and more can improve the tools and information collection for disaster response.

For a preview of the talk, check out Tom's slides:

TIGER/line Data and Open Data in the Cloud

This weekend CrisisCamp is coming to Washington, DC to advance the conversation around how technology can be best used to improve how we respond to disasters and other humanitarian crises.

Eric, Robert, and Tom will be there from Development Seed and are excited to dive into the conversation, hear how people are using technology in disaster scenarios, find out what works and what doesn’t, and learn what needs still need to be met. We’re particularly interested in learning what information and data first responders still need. Recently, we’ve done a lot of work to make maps and government data more open and accessible, by getting US TIGER data hosted in Amazon’s cloud and road map data from several African countries up on Open Street Map, and we’d love to find out what other information first responders need.

CrisisCamp is set up BarCamp style, and Robert is hoping to lead a session on some of what we’ve been working on, specifically on how to integrate Drupal with open source GIS tools. In this talk, he’ll show some examples of Drupal sites that leverage PostGIS, Mapnik, OpenLayers, GeoRSS, and Amazon Cloud Storage that give distributed teams flexible ways of creating and sharing maps.