Making CommunitySense

Efficient task management is an essential component of community workflow management, all the more as standardized organizational structures and procedures for coordinating activities are often lacking in collaborative communities. Before starting with group task management, first the task management for individuals ("to do lists") needs to be taken care of. Countless task management tools, planner web sites, Personal Information Managers etc. are available. However, task management tool support is not enough.  read more »

Visualization of data is a powerful idea in community informatics. Creating a Powerpoint slide is nice for a public presentation, but to make web sites come alive, automated, data-driven approaches are indispensable. One of the most powerful and elegant generators is GraphViz. This suite of tools allows human users, or, much more powerful, data-driven applications, to "program" an image as it were. To this purpose, it offers a whole range of primitives and parameters, which can be used to generate very complex graphics.  read more »

Open source content management systems like Drupal have great potential for organizations and networks as instruments for creating a sense of collaborative community. However it is essential to make a clear business case of why Drupal is a good idea, in order to convince management and (potential) users. The technie community traditionally has not been very good at this, but some interesting explanations are under construction. Some relevant links:  read more »

• The Drupal Business Case