Posts tagged with "open source"
Hey, That's a Nice Map! New Custom Mapping Module for Drupal
Nice Map Module Makes it Easy to Make Beautiful, Custom Maps on Drupal
Putting your content on a highly custom map is now as quick and as easy as putting those same nodes in a list. That’s because the Nice Map module can do the heavy lifting for you by acting as a WMS client that integrates with Views. A WMS – or Web Mapping Service – is a standard that lets applications like websites request a map from a mapping server. Using the WMS standard gives you the flexibility to use a public WMS server or to use your own mapping server where you have complete control over the maps, which is what we’ve been doing recently for our custom mapping work.
Drupal on the Cover of Information Week Magazine
Information Week Discusses Why Drupal is Gaining on Proprietary CMSs in Businesses
In an issue largely dedicated to discussing how open source software has become a serious competitor for business technology solutions, Drupal landed front and center on the cover of Information Week. Drupal has been a leading content management system for the nonprofit and media sectors for some time, and it’s great to see its merits being recognized by the business sector as well.
Stumble Safely Launched on Drupal for a Fun, Late Apps for Democracy Entry
Because After Biking All Day, Beer Tastes Better
As you can see, we think that what the DC government is doing by opening up its data and asking people to mash it up is a great idea. We hope that more cities follow the lead. To put put our support behind this initiative we decided to enter another website in the contest - one that focuses on the lighter side of things. Welcome to Stumble Safely, a website that will help you find the best bars and a safe path to stumble home on.
You can see some of our favorite spots on these maps like The Raven, Solly's, and Stetson's (where we have our Drupal meetups). It doesn't matter when or where you start drinking for Stumble Safely to help you. You can see on these maps the crime data based on day time, evening or night to check out what's most relevant for your party schedule. And since drinking is all about bringing friends together, we are listening for key terms like Adams Morgan, Busboys and Poets, and others that show where the party is on Twitter and posting the messages here.
Stumble Safely was built for the Apps for Democracy competition. If you like Stumble Safely, vote for it!. The purpose of the competition is to show what's possible when governments open up city data so people can use it how they'd like on websites like this. With this website, we're using data from DC Crime Data,DC Road Polygons, DC Liquor Licenses, DC Water, DC Parks, and DC Metro Stations.
Not only is this about open data, but Stumble Safely is built entirely on open source software (Drupal/Mapnik) and one of only two apps in the competition to be 100% open source.
Vote for Drupal in the Apps for Democracy Competition, Only 12 Hours Left!
The Only 100% Open Source Entry Will Show the Government that Drupal Rocks
You can show that Drupal is the platform of choice for governments by voting in the next 12 hours in the Apps for Democracy contest. There’s no login required and voting only takes three seconds, so vote!
This competition is an experiment by the Washington, DC government to see what developers can do with open data streams of city data. If they like the results, they’ll open up more data and make it freely available next year. This is also a great opportunity to show governments that open source software – and Drupal – rock. Our submission is the only one that’s 100% open source.
The site you just voted on is called OutsideinDC, and it’s a guide to biking in Washington, DC. The site makes it easy to find bike routes with bike lanes, monitor bike theft in real time, and find bike equipment on Craigslist. OutsideinDC runs on Drupal and is a great example of the powerful aggregation tools and mapping work happening with the platform. Drupal and Mapnik can do a lot for other government projects as they have very powerful tools for aggregating and parsing data, and we hope this will be a strong example of that. All the aggregation in OutsideinDC is thanks to FeedAPI and Feed Element Mapper, and we could not have built this website in three days without Drupal’s new spaces module
Thanks for voting for Drupal!
OutsideinDC: A Guide to Biking in Washington, DC
Find Bike Routes, Monitor Bike Theft, and Get a Bike
OutsideinDC is a guide to biking in Washington, DC where you can find detailed bike routes for commuting or fun, monitor bike theft in real time, and use Craigslist to shop for equipment. It’s a community space, so if you have a tip or want to sound off on biking in DC, just add #dcbike to a twitter message and it will show up on the front page of this site.
We built this site for the Apps for Democracy competition. If you like OutsideinDC, vote for it!. The competition closes at 11:59 on Wednesday, November 12. The purpose of the competition is to show what great community tools – like this site – are possible when governments open up their data and let people use it. OutsideinDC is built entirely on open source software and is the only app in the competition to be 100% open source. The site is built on Drupal, and there’s no google maps here, just Mapnik, a C++/Python GIS toolkit, which is drawing all the maps and has awesome anti-aliasing rendering.
Drupal Named the Best Open Source CMS
Drupal Wins Packt Publishing's Prize for the Second Year in a Row
Drupal was named the best open source content management system by Packt Publishing for the second year in a row! What a great prize for the huge community of developers who work on Drupal and have made it the robust, stable, and powerful platform that it is. It’s exciting to see Drupal recognized for what it’s achieved, and to see its portfolio grow to include some of the most well known names in the world like Harvard Science, NASA, Warner Brothers Music, Lifetime Television, and the United Nations, to name just a few.
Drupal has come a long when from when we first started working with it five years ago, and it’s fantastic to see all the hard work and smart ideas recognized. Congratulations to Drupalers!
Week in DC Tech: October 6 Edition
Debates, Open Source CMSs, and Start Ups
In typical DC-style, life is getting more political as we get within a month of the presidential election. If you haven’t yet registered to vote, get going. Today is the last day to register for Washington, DC and Virginia residents, while Maryland residents have until October 14. In more politics, it seems like almost every bar is throwing a debate watching party on Tuesday for the second presidential debate. If you don’t want to play debate bingo or presidential flip cup, stay in tomorrow night and plan to go out the rest of the week instead when there are some interesting tech events taking place. As always, a full listing can be found at DC Tech Events.
All Week
Plone Conference: Open source conferences seem to be flocking to Washington, DC, and with good reason since the city is home to so many techies using open source. If you work with Plone or want to, check out the conference and some of the post-conference parties.
Tuesday, October 7 and Wednesday, October 8
10:00 am
Presenting Data and Information: A One-Day Course by Edward Tufte: There’s little question that Edward Tufte is the master of presenting a ton of data in a clear, concise, and compelling way. If you want to up your data visualization know-how, check out this course.
Wednesday, October 8
7:00 – 9:00 pm
Drupal Lab: Here’s your chance to tear into the code behind a module with Drupal developers of all levels, show off your latest work, or just get a feel for what it’s like to program in Drupal.
Nokia Data Gathering: Open Source Survey Creation and Distribution for Traditional Telecommunications Networks
Questionnaires Are Created on a PC then Distributed to Mobile phones; Data is Sent Back to a Server and Integrated into Existing Systems for Analysis
I found out last week (thank you Aid Worker Daily and Ben Truscello) that Nokia is developing open source survey creation software that will allow users to generate tailored questionnaires that are accessible with mobile devices on a normal mobile telecommunications network.
I got this from the new site they set up for the software.
Questionnaires are created on a PC using the system’s Survey Creator module. These questionnaires are then distributed to the mobile phones of the field personnel. When the field workers finish their surveys, they send the data back to the server, from which it can be integrated to the organization’s existing systems for immediate analysis. It is very flexible and easy to use. It also provides GPS location information for each record, which would otherwise require dedicated instruments.
As for the open source side of the software, not many details are available on the site. The website says this tool is created with open-source technologies, which could obviously mean that the software itself is not open source. We'll have to see about that. What they have said is
Drupal for Nonprofits: Eric Interview by End Poverty Blog
Listen to the Podcast Interview: Open Source for NGO's
Yesterday Jason Wojciechowski from the UN Millennium Campaign interviewed our own Eric Gundersen about his thoughts on how nonprofit organizations can use open source applications like Drupal for the End Poverty Blog. Eric talks, amongst other things, about how the accessibility of Drupal and some of its newer features like multilingual support make it a leading application for nonprofits of all sizes located around in the world.
Building Open Source Applications for OLPC with Drupal
One Web Server + Drupal Per Child
We've been hearing a lot of talk about how the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) needs more software developed for it if it's going to really live up to its potential impact. Since lately we've been developing some generalizable applications like a Disaster Relief Stick that runs a disaster relief toolset on a USB drive, an intranet package to help geographically dispersed teams communicate, and our first product Managing News (all built on Drupal), I thought it would be fun to see how easy it is to get Drupal running on the OLPC laptop and to see what the potential is for some other cool applications like these getting on there.
Turns out that Drupal could be a flexible software application for the OLPC laptop. Three hours later (minus four hours spent hunting down a bug noted below) Drupal was up and running. Right now, I'm viewing the Drupal site being served off the OLPC next to my desk from my MacBook via its private IP address. Wow, it's fast! The hardest part about the installation was the small keyboard ; ).
Just think of all the applications that - once made lighter - students could get on their OLPC laptops. Our next move it to get our intranet package on the OLPC machine - its light weight wiki could help students collaborate together on their own machines. You can imagine how Drupal and OLPC can be used to help organize classrooms where students use OLPCs in a mesh network, with or without greater internet connectivity. We all know Drupal can do practically anything and can usually do it quite well. Now there is the opportunity for classroom intranets, student-editable wikis, and teacher portals to run on OLPCs. Each OLPC can be a web server, with the potential to serve Drupal to other students and teachers. That leaves the possibility for each child of OLPC to become a web content manager, a web server administrator, a content collaborator/creator, and ultimately, a Drupal hacker.
But getting back to what you really want to know - how we did it. (Note: We'll maintain a wiki of these instructions on the groups.drupal.org page.)