CampusActivism.org / ActivismNetwork.org

Today I finished another release for the software.

The big thing is more caching. All the display pages are cached (if the client chooses to do so).

But perhaps the bigger thing is the lack of bugs. There was one minor bug fix, but other than I didn't know of any other bugs. Of course part of this is the lack of feedback I get from users, but it also testifies to the fact that version 3 is getting pretty solid. Hopefully this new caching system doesn't break anything.

Statement of Purpose
General: Online network software that includes people, groups, events, resources (a.k.a. files), schools – and several less useful things (email lists, campaigns). Users submit information and then control it. Features include: geocoding (both US and international), mapping, total syndication using web-services (the software is separated into server and client parts), international language support, interconnections (people can be connected to groups, that can be connected to issues, that can be connected to resources and so on), and more.

Specific: Targets the needs of activists (including people new to activism, part-time activists, and full-time organizers). Particularly useful for grassroots organizations with limited resources.

I'm getting up to speed on Drupal. I read the only published book on it, which is a good introduction to the subject but is entirely lacking on the advanced stuff (there is a more advanced book coming out in mid-2007). I've read through most of the documentation in the Drupal online handbook - which has been more insightful, though parts of it are in need of editing. I'm impressed at the list of modules and thus functionality that is possible with Drupal.

While I've been following Drupal/CivicSpace for about two years, this new found interest is because I'm planning to do some Drupal consulting work to pay the bills and because I hope to convert the Campus Activism / Activism Network software into a Drupal module to make it more appealing for organizations to use as part of their website.

I'm dramatically increasing the number of releases for the Activism Network project. I'm now averaging one release every two weeks.

ONE Northwest (an environmental tech group) has a blog called Movement As Network that advocates for an increased focus on networking (and a downplaying of organizational ego) if one wants to build social movements and be successful.

See their paper.

I think the Activism Network software is Network-Centric. We emphasize the network. There isn't any one organization that comes close to even being a tenth or a twentieth of the site's content. Instead the site includes over a thousand activist groups that belong to over a hundred networks. These groups (and people) are involved in hundreds of different campaigns.

The best release yet. Or so I hope. Fixed some medium-sized bugs.

Download

I've released Activism Network 3.0.3. It's better than the previous version (3.0 release canidate 2).

I encourage people to check it out and provide feedback. I'm going to do a freshmeat.net release soon.

It's the same version running on campusactivism.org - so it's relatively solid.

Ok, I'm serious. I mean it. A real release. Mass chaos. Security issues. Error messages galore. Bugs. Struggling at 3am to fix things, because traffic is lower then and less people will notice.

I'm hoping to convert campusactivism.org (and activismnetwork.org) over to Version 3.0 of this software that has been in development for about TWO YEARS.

It will mostly look like activismnetwork.org does now. However there is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes. For instance I tried to make everything better organized and simpler (ex. the number of MySQL tables will fall from around 70 to around 50). There is better documentation of the code. I've got decent international support which I'm inviting developers to test out by installing the software on their own website. I wrote an installation guide and made it easier to install.

I'm working on getting Activism Network software to work for an activist in Turkey. So I'm struggling with

1) Importing the Geonames Table - with UTF-8
I had to re-import the geonames table (that has world cities, with longitudes/latitudes) so that I would preserve the UTF-8 fields. UTF-8 uses 1-3 characters to express each letter and can support almost all of the world's languages. I had a lot of trouble importing data. Finally got it to work using Navicat's import wizard when I split the data into two chunks (otherwise it was only importing 37,000 of the 53,000 rows). Turkey has 53,000 rows in the geonames table - so hopefully most of the small to large cities are in it. It's only 4mb - so the size isn't bad at all if you just need data for one country. By contrast, the entire geonames database is 400mb (with indexes).

Check out this example of general usage of this software. Using Campus Activism/Activism Network for non-activist purposes -- A Soccer Network.

http://www.activismnetwork.org/soccer/

It's based on the latest software build (which isn't yet publicly released), and is not a finished product.

It uses .po files to translate the language into "non-activist" english. For instance, "issue" is replaced with "tag".

You also need to create your own database to store the information and several other things which I'm going to make e