CivicActions

For its third DrupalCamp, the Paris Drupal community is performing an awesome experiment: building a website in 48 hours for a local NGO.

A very open application process drew a dozen applications from NGOs across France, with a wide variety of anti-poverty, development, and other missions. This led to the selection of Project Aurore, which is focussed on social development and "réinsertion sociale" for socially excluded groups. Aurore desire a new site to catalog social agencies in Paris (emergency housing, meals, healthe care, etc) so that their targetted communities can easily find what they need, when they need it, mixed with a video blog that reports on the same.

Google has announced their web browser Chrome. Many are excited while others remain skeptical. Currently I'm both; but a recent discovery has swayed me towards skeptical. Here's why.

Have I ever told you how much I love data? After listening to Larry Garfield's talk Drupal Databases: The Next Generation, I now love data more than ever!

The database layer for Drupal 7 has been completely rewritten to take advantage of PHP's PDO extenion. Not only does it allow Drupal to work with many different database types it also simplifies how developers interact with the database.

Warning: Code is really in alpha state, however since this module is one of the most important and overlooked ones out there in terms of i18n, I thought I should mention it on the planet if others may want to pick it up and polish what is pretty much working now. Here is the issue for the drupal-5 port.

If you don't know what Active Translation is, from the maintainer: Andrew aka drewish:

If you're a themer, you know you want it. You crave for it every day. It's a hunger, never relenting, pushing you closer each day towards the brink. You'd consider doing just about anything -- legal or otherwise -- to end the agony of using Internet Explorer 6.

Drupalcon Szeged is one week away. I am glad I am attending, and I am planning on leading a Birds of a Feather (BOF) during the conference. The focus of the BOF is creativity and programming. I want to discuss the weird mix of human behavior and code. Sounds strange I know, so let me describe in more detail.

Ethan just sent an email out to the CivicActions team about an upcoming training in using OpenOffice, the Free software desktop office suite that most of us use.

Our very own Henry Poole was quoted in a PC World article on Barack Obama's web security:

At lunch today I had a great connection with Joe Solomon, a Social Media Consultant, who is the Project Lead of the KnowMore.org Firefox extension.

When installed, KnowMore's icons integrate into Google's search results to help users understand data from the KnowMore database.

KnowMore is community dedicated to chronicling corporate abuses, worker's and human rights, fair trade, business ethics and the environment, via a vast user-generated wiki database.

The extension is powered by KnowMore's new API which enables any developer to take KnowMore's corporate data and build web apps that empower consumers and help citizens hold corporations accountable.

The MetaVid project captures legislative proceedings and make full video streams accessible and searchable from the text transcripts.

Check out MetaVid directly or search Pelosi