Drupalcon Boston 2008 - politics

RedBlueAmerica

Laura — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:08:11 +0000

RedBlueAmerica is a news-and-debate website we designed and developed for The E. W. Scripps Company. From the press release:

The site will serve as an ongoing public forum for a full array of user- generated content, including blogs, personal profiles, videos and more. While focusing at the outset on the 2008 election campaigns, RedBlueAmerica intends to provide the public with an open forum for a wide range of cultural and political views long after the votes have been counted….

With some extensive use of CCK combined with some fancy theming, we developed a site where a neutral article can be displayed along with two opinionated articles — representing the “red” and “blue” political perspectives — that address the same topic. Also added are blogs, polls, a custom poll section called “Truth or Not?” and some less obvious features, such as private messaging.

The traffic projections were such that we had to anticipate and prepare for some fairly robust traffic and posting activity on the site, so we spec’d out and configured an enterprise-level multi-server hosting setup. We did some additional benchmarking and performance tuning to bring the site performance up.

The not-quite-standard page layout, and targeted Doubleclick advertising placement requirements, led to some interesting challenges in theming, including separating the comments (labeled “thoughts” on the site) from the nodes (aka “posts” for readers not familiar with Drupal), which ordinarily would load in tandem, so as to pull them up in separate containers on the page. (We could only blame ourselves for any interesting challenges due to the design, since we did the design ourselves.) Also fun was coding up the custom voting widget on the main topics, which involved some custom image mapping tied in with the voting API, with some jQuery goodness thrown in for good measure.

Free State Project

sethcohn — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:37:02 +0000

The Free State Project is an effort to recruit 20,000 liberty-loving people to move to New Hampshire. They are looking for “neighborly, productive, tolerant folks from all walks of life, of all ages, creeds, and colors who agree” to the political philosophy expressed in the Statement of Intent, that government exists at most to protect people’s rights, and should neither provide for people nor punish them for activities that interfere with no one else, and support the creation of a society in which the maximum role of civil government is the protection of citizens’ rights to life, liberty, and property.

In essence, this includes everyone who wants to cut the size and scope of government by about two-thirds or more. Put in a positive way, most FSP members support policies such as abolition of all income taxes, elimination of regulatory bureaucracies, repeal of most gun control laws, repeal of most drug prohibition laws, complete free trade, decentralization of government, and widescale privatization. People of this disposition may go by many names: “classical liberals” (not the same as modern liberals at all, but followers of Thomas Jefferson and similar thinkers), libertarians, paleoconservatives, constitutionalists, voluntarists, etc., etc. Most recently, this would include a majority of Ron Paul supporters.

Drupal-wise, the site was migrated from mostly handbuilt static content maintained by a single webmaster for a few years, with over 1000 pages, and some java based backend signup code for the membership tracking and statistics. At this point, it’s all done with Drupal, including more complex signup options allowing different membership conditions depending on the member’s own preferences. Development is tracking using source control, and the IT team consists of about 5-6 volunteers.

Machsomwatch.org

liorkesos — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 07:53:41 +0000

Machsomwatch is an established Israeli political organization which is made up of mainly mature (50+) women.
They create massive amounts of content which is fed into “daily reports” which are the by-products of physically traveling to the much discussed Israeli checkpoints and documenting the outcome of their “shift”.
By their physical presence they reduce the amount of violence or harm of human rights.
The challenge in this site was to take a very non technical organization and leapfrog them in to a web2 site featuring a google mashup letting you zoom in to the level of the lone checkpoint.
Movies housed and embedded from youtube, a massive flickr gallery which eventually took over the flickr embedding altogether.

The real pride here is the process the machsomwatch team have passed (I have one of the lead team members get adicted to pressing f5 and finding a fixed website - she tries it on other sites as well :) ).
The internal process and empowerment that was the result of the joint work on the site resulted on really cool situations (Imagine your grandma analyzing google analytics reports and having arguments regarding SEO with her fellow adult friends.

It’s a multi-lingual site (English and Hebrew) (using i18n) and is very interesting to read, look at pictures and learn about the Israeli occupation from a very personal and humane level.

Developed by Drupal.fm (Known as Linnovate locally in Israel)