[development] Connecting Members by Location, Neighbor Connecting

[Steven Clift]

(Please cc: clift at e-democracy.org with your reply. Thanks.)


The other week folks from the BeNeighbors.org initiative of my
non-profit had a great discussion with the Twin Cities Drupal Users
group.

The focus was on how Drupal could be used to connect nearest neighbors
for all sorts of community goodness (like 80% of them on a block or
two including those not online at all or regularly).

Anyway, three main approaches came out of the meeting:

  1. Multi-tech Small Group (Leverage VOIP Drupal)

  2. Dynamic Geo-Based Local Messaging/Alerts - Proximity Connecting

  3. Map/Directory to Distributed Groups Near You

So before we go too far down the road, I was interested in any
connections with existing Drupal modules, projects, or developer
communities.


So:

A. Are there any Drupal groups or projects that you know of who are
developing tools for block level connections (like 100 households)? I
haven't been able to find them so far. An example might be using
Drupal to support neighborhood crime watch.

B. Is there an existing module effort to support geo-coding of the
street addresses (or mobile place for that matter) of Drupal site
members? What about group messaging based on proximity?  (What I like
about this idea is that it would work on a global online community as
well as something hyper local because enabling the X closest members
with the topic initiator determining who gets the alert be it 10, 100
or 1000 closest members scales.)

C. We are looking for examples of Drupal sites designed to be
directories with both "select an area" and pin point options to tie an
item to a map. Any suggestions? (Our goal here is to distribute the
directory data collection and end up with a nice public-friendly map
of where neighbors are connecting online and how to find them.)

D. Who in the Drupal community do you know who might be interested in
collaborating on these themes? (We are open to creating a Group on the
Drupal site, but would rather not re-create the wheel if we do not
need to do so.)

Thanks,

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.org