api

This is a sketch of how some of the ideas discussed in the core conversations configuration management sessions yesterday might look in practice. Obviously this is just one idea and there are plenty of other valid approaches (overall of for any specific piece) - we don't want to get too specific yet. For example, some of what I describe could probably happily live in contrib. I think my big picture point is that the approaches discussed are not mutually exclusive, and in fact we probably need bits of each of them.

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Just about a month ago I returned from the NTEN NTC in San Francisco where I had the opportunity to talk with Peggy Duvette, Angus Parker of WiserEarth and Leif Utne of Zanby and organizing force behind Open Wiser. I then blogged about the OpenWiser fundraising drive to raise $10,000 to build an open API to WiserEarth's database of information about organizations around the world working towards a more sustainable civilization.

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I like many others was completely blown away by Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest. The last 3rd of the book is a compendium of non profit and non governmental organizations around the world that are working on social justice, human rights, sustainability, environmental and indigenous people's issues as well as many others. Hawken's describes these groups collectively as a movement, the largest movement in the history of the world. A movement that is decentralized and global.

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I had a page open from NPR in another window and forgot to mention in my previous post, but NPR also has an API as part of their Open Content Strategy. In keeping with NPR's mission of "a more informed public" allowing public access to content and allowing developers to mash up and revolutionize how people consume NPR content.

Ok, actually, it's the New York Times which has developed an "API" for the U.S. Congress. Basically, the Times has munged together a bunch of data sources (see below) and developed an "API" to allow developers to access and use the data. The information you can get access to includes roll-call vote (voice and division votes are not available right now). The Times does extra calculations including party totals.

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I noticed on the Drupal development mailing list, that Drupal 7 has some significant changes for file handling. From Angie Byron (webchick): I just rolled the second in the series of Drupal 7 unstable releases for developers (see http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2008-October/031094.html for more info). Among the highlights this release are: * Several awesome File API improvements. Files are now "first-class objects" like nodes and users are, the API has been dramatically cleaned up for better consistency, AND there are a slew of new hooks like hook_file_load() and hook_file_validate() for contrib modules to react to when stuff happens to files. This is a great enabler for some awesome stuff in core like image handling and document management. See http://api.drupal.org/api/search/7/hook_file for more info. A HUGE shout-out to Andrew Morton (drewish) for sticking with this patch throughout its long, LONG development cycle. :)

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