Chris Pirillo (about) wants to build on the basis of Drupal to build what’s called an Install Profile, or an easier way of building a community out of the box. Believing that Drupal has all of the power to do what he wants, he and Adam Kalsey have taken on the task of building this Install Profile to be open source and available for anyone to start up their own community with, based on what he is saying, some pretty intense abilities.
It’s not just about hosting videos, audio files, or any piece of random media - it’s the discovery mechanisms between them that make them more relevant…Imagine coming to a site and not just reading about what other people are interested in, but what interests they SHARE with you!
SEO’ed URLs, nimble templates that adhere to a guideline for communities (colors and layout), identity flow, rating, voting, posting, gathering, embedding… a structure that supports both ad hoc and category-driven content… something that is centered on the user instead of the community s/he is involved in.
selections from Chris Pirillo’s post/videoblog
Chris is clearly very excited about this idea, and it’s understandable why he would. Open source projects are very exciting. Chris spells out the implications of something like this being available in an open source way:
I could see using this, in a password protected way, for my neighborhood.… A million different people can use this for a million different things. … Here’s the starting point. You want to build a community? Bam! … Some new product comes out, you want to build a community around it? There you go. Drupal’s got the power. It just needs to be formed.
selections from Chris Pirillo’s post/videoblog
This will be an interesting project to watch. I’m reminded of WordPress’s MU platform, which enables users to, presumably, build their own hosted version of WordPress.com. While the ability for building a community from MU is very much there, it does lack a lot of the features Pirillo mentions right out of the box.
I’m slightly hesitant to sign on completely to the idea of building something quite as extensive as what Perillo is suggesting. It sounds like he wants to have everything possible from the gate, so that individuals can decide what to use and what not to use. But that sounds like a pretty hefty bet. Everyone wants something different, and pleasing everyone right out of the gate isn’t a very reasonable bet.
There are lots of improvements that can be made in the field of open source community platforms. There is plenty to be done.
Side note: expect more of a report on the now announced Activity Stream node before long.
via TechCrunch
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[...] of this is interesting, especially in light of Chris Pirillo’s announcement last week that he is spearheading an open source social network install profile that sounds a lot [...]