Web of Change is not your typical tech conference. This conference (now in its 7th year - this year September 19-23, 2007) takes place in an idyllic setting at Cortes Island in the heart of British Columbia. It's a retreat with a veritable "who's who" at the intersection of social change, online strategy and technology.

Bryght is a sponsor of Web of Change and our president, Kris Krug, attended in 2005 and will be there in 2007.

The Web of Change Drupal connection took off in 2005. In 2005 Drupal and CivicSpace came on strong, with a noticable majority of more technical attendees mentioning it in their opening introduction as the thing they were the most excited about. Conference head honcho Jason Mogus notes: "In my 5 years at that time of running Web of Change we had not seen any one technology platform with as much sustained excitement".

The momentum was so much so that in 2006, the Web of Change conference re-launched their new website using Drupal.

Dries Buytaert, head of the Drupal project, just announced that he will be down in San Francisco at the end of June for a Drupal Road Trip. I've been talking with both Dries and Jeff Robbins of Lullabot about the continued growth of the Drupal community, and I'll be joining them and Zack Rosen of CivicSpace in San Francisco. Jeff took the lead and organized this trip to connect Dries with a lot of interesting people in the Bay Area.

I made an introduction to SpikeSource, someone that we've been working with for some time now. We'll meet with them and talk about the role of SpikeSource and other commercial vendors in providing verified install profiles. SpikeSource has also shown an interest in training (Lullabot!) as well as working with the community on a testing framework.

Why is this happening? Well, as mentioned above, Jeff Robbins is the one who is getting Dries to San Francisco and is setting up all the meetings. He has some ideas around usability and multi-lingualism for Drupal, and ideally some funding for these initiatives. Dries wrote a great paragraph on what he hopes to get out of the trip:
These meetings will give me a chance to talk to these people about what is happening with Drupal and the Drupal community, and get a chance to promote all the great work we've done together. We're going to try and make sure that Drupal can be a little more connected with the larger FOSS community. Maybe it will open up further possibilities for collaboration and support. As always, we'll let things go naturally. Most importantly, I hope to learn from these people and that alone is going to be an invaluable experience.

Like the title says, Zack Rosen of CivicSpace is trying to rally support for the og2list module. Here are some quotes from the reverse bounty post on Drupal.org:

Og2list is an add-on module for Organic Goups. It will provide full blown mailinglist support for groups created within a Drupal website. You can see a demonstration of early og2list functionality in this screencast. We hope to add og2list support to groups.drupal.org when development work is complete.

Why do you want to help fund this add-on module? Well, that's the beauty of open source. Fund it once, and it becomes available for everyone. Zack goes on to explain why this type of functionality is important.

We think og2list will be a very important contribution of critical functionality to the Drupal project. While we are living in the age of "Web 2.0" web-application innovation, most collaboration that takes part in online communities is still facilitated through mailinglists. Properly integrating mailinglist functionality inside a Drupal platform will allow communities to leverage the best of both worlds; the timeliness and convience of email based collaboration combined with powerful features only avaliable through the Drupal platform.

Like the title says, Zack Rosen of CivicSpace is trying to rally support for the og2list module. Here are some quotes from the reverse bounty post on Drupal.org:

Og2list is an add-on module for Organic Goups. It will provide full blown mailinglist support for groups created within a Drupal website. You can see a demonstration of early og2list functionality in this screencast. We hope to add og2list support to groups.drupal.org when development work is complete.

Why do you want to help fund this add-on module? Well, that's the beauty of open source. Fund it once, and it becomes available for everyone. Zack goes on to explain why this type of functionality is important.

We think og2list will be a very important contribution of critical functionality to the Drupal project. While we are living in the age of "Web 2.0" web-application innovation, most collaboration that takes part in online communities is still facilitated through mailinglists. Properly integrating mailinglist functionality inside a Drupal platform will allow communities to leverage the best of both worlds; the timeliness and convience of email based collaboration combined with powerful features only avaliable through the Drupal platform.

Congrats to the CivicSpace Labs team for helping get GoodStorm out the door. Here's the message that Kieran sent to the "announce" list:

GoodStorm is explicitly aimed at helping non-profit organization earn income to support their work through merchandising-- which is to say that it provides production, online sales, and fulfillment of printed branded apparel as an online service.   We think that where CivicSpace helps to provide online tools to organizations, GoodStorm will help the organizations help themselves to become financially sustainable.

We had to push a bit, but we succeeded in getting it all built on Drupal, and tons of new Drupal eCommerce functionality is being funded, built, and contributed back to Drupal as a result.  CiviCRM will be integrated as a toolset for each storeowner, and there will be modules to easily integrate GoodStorm storefronts directly into existing Drupal sites.

I can already think of a million and one uses for this. I've been dissatisfied with CafePress for years and thought (conceptually) that there were better ways to do it. I think GoodStorm is the starting point of this. With remote Drupal integration (and, if they're smart, WordPress and MovableType plugins, too), this would be a great way to do turnkey ecommerce integration. They "just" do t-shirts today, but I'll be watching them with interest to see about the addition of other products.

Large scale ecommerce, especially including the fulfillment/shipping part, is really hard, and I'm glad that we at Bryght didn't try and crack this nut ourselves yet. There have been a lot of people asking us about ecommerce solutions, but we felt we didn't have the tools to quite make it easy enough or turnkey enough yet. The GoodStorm solution will be the perfect starting point for people that want to start selling from their websites today.