Florida Creatives – Creating a Community of Innovation

The idea here is that we can reproduce all of the features of Meetup.com and Google Groups in about an hour using a couple of off-the-shelf open source tools, like Drupal with the Organic Groups module installed.

I just did a really quick setup at FloridaCreatives.com/community - nothing fancy yet, but groups are turned on, so once you register you can create any group you like and ask your friends to join.

Right now there is a group called "Orlando", and one called "Florida Creatives" that you're instantly a member of when you join. I hope in the future this site will be more general purpose and a default like that will be frowned upon. We'll see what happens.

Would anyone like to volunteer to help us move all the current blog and wiki posts over to the new Drupal site? We'll also move all the wiki pages and then throw a bunch of permanent redirect links all over the place, then take away the /community/ at the end of the URL and make this the official site.

Rob Zienert has offered to do a design for us. Rob, let me know what you need. Obviously, please register for the site so I can give you permissions, and I need to get you FTP also.

Many projects remain:

• Creating a space for the podcasts to live
• Setting up event listings, aggregation, feeds
• Setting up blog aggregation (i.e. you post to your blog with a special tag and it goes straight to FLCreatives on your group)
• PayPal buckets? Poster contests? Wall-O-Groups?

Right now the permissions on this site are very liberal - nobody can turn on new modules yet, but email me if you're interested.

OK, this is a really insanely nerdy post for this blog, so I'll stop now and let you get back to your regularly scheduled programming. Look for the "Ladies of BarCamp" post in a few minutes.