Introducing MyCommunity.org -- talk, share, connect

For me, it’s all about unleashing the incredible potential of people, and I believe people are more powerful when they come together. Of course the internet makes this possible as never before in history.

One of the many reasons I was taken with Drupal and decided to place it at the core of my overarching technology strategy was because it made the idea of community a central premise. “Community plumbing” is its tagline. The technology powers the successful Drupal community itself. It’s at the core of the projects I’m working on, as part of my own vision or for clients.

There are communities that are more social in purpose and those that are more professional.

Woven is of the latter — it aims to be a platform for groups of people with common professional pursuits. It strives to provide the tools for working people to come together, to collaborate around projects, and to take action.

Today, however, I focus on the former, which is just as valuable. Simply opening up the conversation for your community, letting people socialize and share, opens up tremendous possibilities. People talk, share, connect and likely go on to create value for your community. Conversation begets collaboration, as I’ve said.

Introducing MyCommunity.org. Talk, share, and connect with your community. Anyone can create a spontaneous group for their community.

For you Drupal folk, it’s built on 4.7.4. Made possible by contributed modules like the superb OG (thanks, Moshe), Views (thanks, Earl), and some others like ogmandatorygroup and pathauto (thanks, all).

I like to work on things that have broad usage and appeal, and to my knowledge nobody’s yet successfully utilized Drupal

• OG to create a general service of this kind. I hope this becomes a successful showing of the strengths of Drupal + OG. I also hope to demonstrate some of my user experience ideas, and you’ll notice much of my work was in making this ” Google friendly” as I like to say. I plan on keeping it basic (pretty much a stock OG install) and slowly adding reliable features.

Sure, there are plenty of services for online groups, and I don’t intend to compete with this offering. Rather, it’s a way for me to demonstrate some of my ideas and tactics, and possibly forge new relationships and professional alliances. It will complement and possibly accelerate what I’m doing with Woven, while hopefully creating a valuable service for some.

It’s in beta, meaning there’s lots to do and plenty of quirks, but the basics are there and I’ll be improving it. Check it out, share your thoughts, follow along.