Planting Liberally

This week, Paul Benson posted an interesting diary at OpenLeft about supporting project groups on progressive blogs. The basic idea is fairly simple: quite often, progressive blog readers want to get together to collaborate on a project. Projects can range in nature and scope widely, and they can have a fixed goal (like producing a catching YouTube video) or an ongoing set of goals (like promoting progressive legislation). But they all seem to share on common characteristic: they are poorly served by the recommended diary section of most progressive blogs. Paul lists only two examples of projects that were successfully organized via diaries - YearlyKos and the Gannon investigation. There are probably a few more we could add to the pile, especially if we reached into the archives of local and statewide blogs, but I think the point stands. Blogs are a great way to share news and opinions and to incite activism; they are not a great way to organize activism.

Paul sketches out a quick-and-dirty example of what a progressive project organizing platform might look like, and I think it's a reasonable first start. There are certainly other online project management tools available, ranging from dotProject to 37 Signals's Basecamp. I would also add that Paul's critique only underscores a point I've been making here in recent weeks: that the progressive blogosphere could be exceptionally well-served by an open-source platform, especially one like Drupal.

There are a couple of Drupal modules which are particularly well-suited to the sort of project management Paul is referring to: Organic Groups and Project. The former allows any Drupal site to be subdivided into a number of workspaces for interest groups. The form of a workspace can itself be flexible - it can be a wiki, a blog, a document-sharing space, or a combination of all of these. The Project module is used to keep track of projects, subdivide them into tasks, and monitor the progress on each task, using a lightweight project-management paradigm. Project was written to support bug tracking for Drupal modules and themes, but it can also be adapted for other purposes. While I have not yet had the chance to incorporate them into the Drupal-based blogging platform I wrote about last week, it's clear that the ability to add these modules easily to any Drupal site is a major advantage to using Drupal to power a progressive blog.

There is also, I think, a larger point to be made about the use of open source software to power the progressive movement. There are many similarities between the progressive movement and most open source software project. They are both decentralized, made up of many independent actors with similar goals. It's no accident that they are both likely to run up against the same kind of collaborative challenges, which is, I think, yet another reason that the progressive movement should build upon the progress made by Drupal.

Last week I posted a prospective roadmap for a Drupal-based progressive community blogging platform. I've begun working on that platform, and have a very rough draft of the platform ready to go. If you are interested in helping out, email me at work (ssachs at lightbulbfirst dot com) or leave a note in the comments, and I can send you more details.

Below, I've written some details about the functionality available to date, as well as some of the upcoming high-level technical challenges. If you are a Drupal developer who'd like to lend your suggestions or expertise, or if you are a blog reader/writer and have some thoughts about how comment voting and recommendations can be improved, feel free to drop a note in the comments. Finally, if you have some thoughts about a good name for this platform, I'm all ears!

In this first release, I've worked on pinning down the user model and the permissions available to each type of user. There are four roles: administrator, owner, front pager, and member. Anyone who registers with the site automatically becomes a member, and is allowed to write blog posts and comments. The administrator is an all-powerful user who has access to all functionality on the site; generally, this is someone who really knows Drupal very well, and is capable of working with all of its features. The owner is the user whose job is to oversee operation of the site and who has power over all users and all content on the site, but might not be a Drupal expert. The owner can make other users front pagers, or can block or delete users at will; she may also promote or delete content at will. Front pagers are normal users in every way except one - their blog posts automatically appear on the front page. Blog posts which don't appear on the front page automatically will appear in a right hand sidebar called "Recent member posts".

In the near future I will work on making the user profiles a little bit more interesting. That will include a signature line, an about me section and a URL for the user's home page. I'm fairly comfortable with the technical work needed to accomplish that - for the Drupal developers in the room, I'll be using the Content Profile module, and I'll write some custom code to display comments in a separate tab on the user profile screen.

The other upcoming functional improvement is comment ratings. I am somewhat familiar with the Voting API, but would be curious to hear from others whether there are superior ways to implement comment ratings. If it's possible to implement recommended diaries at the same time, so much the better.

Last week I wrote a brief series on developing a Drupal-based progressive community blog platform. As a bit of background, Drupal is a leading open source content management system; at work, most of the websites I build use Drupal. In light of the vulnerabilities of the Soapblox platform, which hosts many local and some nationwide progressive blogs, it's become apparent that an open-source software packages, specifically tuned to the needs of progressive bloggers, would be a valuable asset.

The initial series last weekend got a fair amount of interest, but there was one theme that was fairly strong among the comments: Drupal is a great platform, but it's not user-friendly enough for most bloggers. There is, to be sure, some kernel of truth in that critique - Drupal is not that easy to use out-of-the-box. On the other hand, a savvy developer can turn Drupal into one of the most easy-to-use, powerful platforms for blogging around. If you have any doubts, I'd suggest you visit OnSugar and create a free account - the system is a hosted, Drupal-based blogging platform, and in my opinion it is at least as user-friendly as Wordpress, if not more so.

While I don't know if I'll ever be able to put together something as nice as OnSugar, I'd like to give it a shot. In the next few weeks, I hope to release a simple Drupal-based community blogging platform, which will include some (but not quite all) of the features many of us are already familiar with in most progressive community blogs. The platform will be released on drupal.org under the GNU General Public License, like all other Drupal contributions, so that others can download it and try it out. The hope is that this platform will improve over time, with the help of other progressive Drupal developers, progressive bloggers, readers, and anyone else who is interested. Below, I've outlined a prospective, best-case-scenario roadmap for this platform. I'd love to get feedback on this, so if you have critiques for the roadmap, if you'd like to help out - or if you're already working on a similar Drupal-based platform - please let me know!

Stage 1. Basic community platform

In this stage, we will develop a Drupal installation profile which contains the basic features needed for a progressive community blog. In particular, readers will be allowed to create new user accounts, and to comment and post their own blog posts using those accounts. Recent user blog posts will appear in a sidebar. Users will also be able to vote on one another's comments, and administrators will be allowed to front-page a diary or promote users to be front-pagers. One thing we might not include in this release is the ability to recommend diaries, and for recommended diaries to appear in their own sidebar block.

Stage 2. Platform enhancements

In this stage, we will make incremental improvements to the platform, in order to develop features which are similar to (or slightly better than) those of the basic Soapblox platform. These features will include recommended diaries (if they didn't make it into the first stage), user profiles and WYSIWYG editing. We will also include features that give administrators some options for tweaking the look-and-feel of their site, including specifying a color scheme, easily trying out new themes, and managing their sidebar blocks. At this stage, we may also consider adding functionality to allow bloggers to import their blog posts and comments from other platforms - like Blogspot, Soapblox, and Wordress - without much effort.

Stage 3. Hosted platform

Assuming that the platform has gained a toe-hold among progressive bloggers, we will begin to explore deploying the software on a hosted platform. The challenge at this point will be more of a business model challenge than a technical one - the question is how to finance hosting and software maintenance at a cost acceptable to most bloggers. One option is monthly fees, but it's possible that the fees required to maintain the system would be too high to be acceptable. Another option is dedicated advertising space, a percentage of merchandising sales, or some other shared-revenue approach, as I discussed last week. This stage will likely be a crucial one, in terms of making the platform widely accessible, as it will provide bloggers with a turnkey solution that lets them get a Drupal-based progressive community blog up and running with minimal effort.

Stage 4. Turbocharged community

At this stage, it will finally be possible to begin taking advantage of some of Drupal's more powerful community features. These include Open ID login; community calendars; lightweight intranet features that facilitate the work of committees or project teams; libraries of appropriately-licensed embeddable images and videos; polls and anonymized survey/data gathering tools. It would even be possible to add some e-activism features, similar to those at FireDogLake, and, if the appropriate state-level data is available, to create state-based e-activism tools. This stage would likely have several sub-stages; many of these features are uncharted waters for local blogs, and would require careful requirements gathering and testing before rollout.

Stage 5. Built-in financial stability

There are a number of ways in which Drupal can help bloggers earn more money, and this stage would focus on that problem. A DailyKos-like "advertising-free" subscription module would help bloggers earn dedicated revenue from a loyal customer base. Modules which automatically display "buy now" links on book reviews and similar posts could help bloggers earn more commissions from merchandising sales. More exotic possibilities are also available. For example, bloggers could write e-books and sell them directly from their site using Drupal's Ubercart module. Or, the system could integrate with Mochila, and allow bloggers to profit by reselling their work and even (with appropriate permission, profit-sharing, and so forth) their readers' diaries.

Again, if you have thoughts and suggested improvements for this roadmap, please drop a line in the comments! I'd also be interested to hear from developers who might be willing to help out, or who have already started building something similar.

Yesterday's post on the next steps forward, in light of Soapblox's near-meltdown, generated some very interesting suggestions and questions, and even a bit of a good old-fashioned programming language holy war, in the comment thread.  Alert reader Jon Pincus also pointed me to Pam Spaulding's very insightful thoughts about Soapblox.  Pam gets right to the heart of the matter in pointing out that the issue underlying this meltdown is money, or lack thereof.  Progressive bloggers aren't wealthy, and some of them failed to pay even Soapblox's reasonable monthly fees.

I do not think there will ever be a single, ideal blogging platform for all progressive bloggers, for the simple reason that each blogger will make her own decisions about where and when to post.  Soapblox may grow and thrive for a long time to come; I hope it does.  But I would also like to see the development of an alternative system that is every bit as easy to work with, and every bit as cheap, as Soapblox, but with a stronger technological foundation.  Ideally, I would like to see an alternative system that is more feature-rich, and capable of supporting the next wave of progressive organizing that is already beginning.

In particular, I believe that progressive Drupal developers will need to produce a "Dailykos-lite" version of Drupal, which makes it easy and cheap for progressive bloggers to start new blogs whose functionality imitates that of Dailykos.  Moreover, I think we will need to provide a turnkey solution for starting and hosting a Drupal-based Dailykos-lite blog with a reasonable monthly fee, similar to wordpress.com.  Using such a hypothetical solution, a progressive blogger would be able to do the following, at minimum: give front-page access to multiple bloggers, allow readers to post and recommend diaries in a sidebar, promote user diaries on a case-by-case basis, allow readers to rate one anothers comments, ban trolls, and add special sidebar features from time to time.  Such a system should be easy-to-use, and should require no more than a few minutes' setup time in order to get up and running.

The big question is, how will we pay for the development of such a system; even more tricky, how will we pay for the maintenance of the system?  Setting the development question aside, I think the maintenance question is one where there is some room to innovate.  Instead of using the monthly-fees model - reasonable though it may be - it might make sense to develop a hosted system in which a certain portion of advertising space is set aside for the hosting provider, and all revenue from that space is given to the hosting provider.  Other revenue-sharing models - e.g., some percentage of all affiliate or merchandising sales - are also possible, but this kind of model would ensure that, as long as people using the blogging platform, there is a steady stream of revenue available for keeping the platform afloat.

There are, incidentally, other opportunities lurking in the shadows of such agreements.  The hosting system could also provide help for bloggers who meed legal protection, it could develop a library of licensed artwork available for bloggers to use in their graphic designs and individual blog posts.  Or it might be possible for the hosting system to become a full-fledged support agency for bloggers, capable of licensing bloggers' writing for republication; arranging speaking engagements and book deals for popular bloggers; helping bloggers land consulting engagements; providing health insurance and other typical job benefits; and more.  Some of these ideas are a bit exotic or, to be honest, entirely unrealistic, given how little money is available to support blogging.  But I think it's important to remember that creating new opportunities for bloggers means more than just developing fancy software.

I'd love to hear more from progressive bloggers about what kinds of things they want or need out of a blogging platform.  Starting with the very basics, what kind of features - in addition to those listed above - do you need to go about day-to-day blogging?  How much are you willing to pay for those features, or, if you'd rather not pay, what kinds of blog platform business models are palatable to you?  What other forms of support could a robust platform provide?

This week Soapblox, the content management system and hosting platform of choice for many, many local progressive blogs, had a serious meltdown due to a massive hacker attack, and nearly collapsed. The attack on Soapblox immediately took down a huge chunk of the progressive blogosphere's infrastructure, and threatened catastrophe for the progressive movement, just as a new session of Congress and a new administration was getting started. The story was already covered ably at DailyKos, Open Left, and many other progressive blogs. The consensus that appears to have emerged after a fairly short but very wide-ranging discussion is: it may make sense to transition to another system eventually; for now there is no readily available alternative; Soapblox is a shoestring operation run by a good progressive; so progressives should chip in to save Soapblox.

My career is web development, so I naturally have a very keen interest in this story. If the progressive blogosphere was a single organization, if it could have anticipated its current needs a few years ago, and if it had asked me for an ideal platform to meet those needs, I almost certainly would have suggested a system based in Drupal, or perhaps multi-user Wordpress. Both are software packages that are more than capable of handling all of the sundry needs of most progressive bloggers, and actually quite a few more. Of course, the progressive blogosphere isn't a single organization, and even if it was it certainly couldn't have anticipated its current needs a few years ago, so I never had a chance to propose that kind of solution.

Instead of that scenario, Soapblox emerged, through an organic process that ranged over the past several years, as the platform of choice for many leading progressive blogs. Soapblox is a reasonably good technological platform, but I think the key to its success, until this week, was its low barrier to entry. For a low monthly fee and with very little technological expertise, a blogger could launch a full-featured blog that was felt, to readers, a lot like DailyKos. In contrast, Drupal and multi-user Wordpress would require an awful lot of tinkering and monkey-wrenching in order to simulate the Dailykos experience.

With Soapblox hanging by a thread, it's important to develop a new and stronger alternative to the old system. There's very little question, in my mind, that the best foundation for this kind of hosted blogging system will be Drupal, for a wide variety of reasons. First, Drupal's out-of-the-box features include user-specific diaries, moderated comments, and the capability to front-page a diary - those are all key features of Soapblox. What Drupal lacks is the ease-of-use of Soapblox, but as OnSugar demonstrated late last year, it's entirely possible to run a hosted, easy-to-use blogging platform on Drupal. Second, Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems in the world, which means it has an enormous user, developer, and support community; there is no single point of failure in the Drupal community, meaning that a near-meltdown like Soapblox's is nearly unthinkable. Finally, there is already a considerable degree of cooperation between the Drupal and progressive communities. Many local Dean organizing groups, and later DFA chapters, developed websites based in Drupal, thanks largely to the release of a Drupal distribution called Deanspace, (which later changed its name to Civic Space Labs). Today, there are a variety of progressive Drupal development firms, including Development Seed, Chapter Three, Prometheus Labor, ZivTech, and my own company, Lightbulb First Consulting, LLC. Drupal is a community which is strongly based in a number of open source values, including meritocracy, transparency and accountability - the same values that drive the progressive blogosphere.

As with all crises, this one holds an opportunity to rebuild something which is not just as good as, but actually much better than, the old Soapblox platform. Drupal has, for a very long time, had extensions which provide robust, automated search engine automization (via the Pathauto and Global redirect modules); anonymous survey tools (via the Webform module); ecommerce tools (via the Ecommerce or Ubercart module, take your pick); calendaring features (via the Date and Calendar modules); and lightweight intranet features (via the Organic groups module). As of about a year ago, Drupal includes support for OpenID integration, meaning that a Drupal-based progressive blogging platform will lower the barriers of cross-blog cooperation, since it will be possible to allow readers of one blog to comment and post on another blog without creating a new account. Drupal will soon include support for semantic integration, meaning that progressive bloggers will be able to gather data sets and share them with one another easily. In short, the creation of a new Drupal-based blogging platform will make it possible to extend and expand the range of functionality available in progressive blogs in ways that are essentially unimaginable with Soapblox.

Primarily, I think it is the responsibility of the progressive Drupal community (which I count myself a part of), to answer this call-to-arms. We must develop a stronger, better alternative to the Soapblox platform, and we must properly productize and market that solution in order to make it palatable to progressive bloggers. These are busy days for me, and it's not entirely clear that I'll have time to develop such a product on my own, or to organize a larger effort. But I think we need to get the ball rolling very soon, because the days when it made sense to run the progressive blogosphere on a shoestring are long gone.

Full disclosure: My company offers Drupal-based web development services, and therefore is a competitor to Soapblox. We also worked on a small design project for Open Left about a year ago, and we submitted a business plan to the Blogpac entrepreneurship contest.